I think one of the most valuable abilities for a good programmer is to be a good listener. A big part of that is also being able to ask good questions. You need to be able to fully understand the problem to be able to develop the right solution -- remember, the solution that customer actually needs is not always the one they think they want. Also, being able to listen also means you will be better able to learn new skills.

You have no idea what you're talking about. A passing car is louder than a small, well-tuned quad with quality balanced rotors at ground level. 30' in the air? Barely audible. There are noisier ones. I work with a 25-pound octo that sounds completely horrifying, and I know when and where to operate it. But thanks for speaking out of ignorance - it helps to put all of this stuff in perspective.

No, it will not. That's not even theoretically possible. An upscaler simply can not add information that isn't there. I have worked with both real-time upscaling and non-real-time, which is significantly better since it can spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to add detail. I have never seen any upscaler able to come close to the original material. Not from SD to HD nor from HD to 4K.

That depends. If the material is of recent production it is not, it is downscaled either from 4K or 8K. If the images were available in decent quality on film, it is probably scanned at 4K and downscaled to HD. To see the difference, get the Blue Planet series, watch the Seas of Life part. Most of the Blu-Ray is filmed on film, scanned at high quality and down-sampled to 1080p. Most of the under-water scenes are shot in SD. To me, the transitions from HD to up-scaled SD material is jarring. Very jarring. Others do not notice.

I own several of the very, very best ones. They can not touch "native" HD material. Not even close. I also shoot quite a bit in 4K and down-sample that to 1080P. 4K down-sampled to 1080P blows material that is shot in 1080P out of the water. The quality difference is staggering. At 1080P.

Or, you are yourself a toxic seed planted by The Man in order to foment FUD and make good people not want to be part of these projects. Or something like that. Give it a rest with the absurd conspiracy crap.

I've flown that exact same piece of equipment at 3:00 AM, just for fun. Not on Pennsylvania Ave in downtown DC, of course. But if the guy's a hobby flier up late on a weekend night playing with this quad copter, maybe trying to get a couple of cool scenic night time shots, is that so hard to believe? Or is your tinfoil hat so tight that you're also going to assume I can't possibly have been up late updating firmware, swapping some motors around, and then stepped outside in the low-traffic, peaceful night time hours to test my handiwork? Can't be! I must be an FBI stooge! Please.

The problem is that the incoming drone could easily be flying below tree-top height. Like, 20 feet off the ground. Laser counter measures would be shooting at a target that would have large office buildings and other structures directly behind it.

Just look up the "DC FRZ" - it's illegal to fly any sort of RC device in a 30-mile circle around DCA. That absolutely includes the White House grounds, and large swaths of the surrounding suburbs.

When the Bill Clinton administration pushed the idea of banning encryption, his Attorney General Janet Reno made a statement that it needs to be banned because of paedophiles. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme!

That's not really a system of thought, though, because it doesn't define a system. It describes the way that some people may, out of pure irrationality, imagine the world to work in their childish fantasies. When you get a bunch of people together and decide (look, a group decision!) that there will be no group decisions (?) forming any sort of authority or formal structure governing how they all interact, you're basically walking away from civilization. At best, you're setting up for medieval feudalism. True, you don't have to fear abuse from an authority you establish ... instead, you have to fear abuse from anyone who feels like using force to abuse you, and you've got no recourse because you've already decided that recourse beyond your own ability to withstand the use of force against by one or a thousand or a million other people is too organized and authoritative for your taste. By not establishing authority, one cedes authority to anyone else who feels like claiming it. So, people espousing that point of view are basically twits.

Really? So, you'd be in favor of the government making sure they know who is and who isn't gay in order properly run skewed elections and referenda? How about simply having a clause in your constitution that says (as ours does) that everyone is treated equally under the law? Isn't that simpler than getting the government involved in keeping lists of who is on which part of a given spectrum of sexual orientation or skin color, etc?

Related Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-...

I was in the same boat as Anonymous Coward GP. My company paid me the same as regular workers, the lawyers were working hard to get me a Green Card (and I did get one too) etc. The H1B scare on /. always surprises me. A couple of questions:

1. Is there a high level of unemployment in the sector that uses the most H1Bs?
   I left the US a handful of years back, but when I was there, that was not the case. I worked for a start-up growing from four to forty employees when I was there, hiring engineers was always an issue, we simply could not get enough qualified applicants from the US and was regularly forced (by our needs) to get H1Bs.
2. Are typical H1B workers in the US paid worse than others with a similar level of education?
   Again, when I lived in the US, paying for a house, a cleaner, a nanny and a decent car on my salary was not an issue. My wife got a work permit and worked in a non-stem field, her salary was less than half of mine, but her job also required at least a bachelor.
3. Are US engineers seeing their salaries going below people with an equivalent education level or lower?
   I'd love to see numbers indicating this. I hear from "Silicon Valley" about over-paid people driving people with "normal" pay out of the city and way out of the region due to property price increases. Are these stories untrue? The number of CEOs in these companies are not enough to make property prices sky-rocket, that phenomenon must be caused by lots and lots of "regular Joe's" in the tech companies having significantly higher salaries than the average in the area.

Wooosh

Seriously. You still believe the population explosion myth? You need to read a publication on the issue that is newer than about 1970.

Nope. The naming does, but the count doesn't. In my end of the world the first floor is the lowest you can get (unless there is a basement) but in the UK, the first floor is my second floor. We'd not disagree on the number of floors though.