Tell the damn truth.

I come from what was considered a "rough" area of London. My schoolfriends were all police-hating idiots. Even through to today, I've had to remove people from Facebook because they were doing things like suggesting to "fight the pigs" when it came to the London riots. Just the terminology used tells you EXACTLY what kind of reaction they would have to being pulled over, and precisely WHY the police bother them so much.

I've been pulled over by the police just as much. I have a tendency to drive old bangers of cars - legal, but they look scruffy and even I would admit that I'd pull them in "just to check" if I was a police officer. Fact is, I know they are legitimate and roadworthy or I wouldn't be driving the damn things.

But when pulled over, I don't start yelling. I'm not all sucking up, either, I just tell them the truth. If you have to lie to a police officer to make things go smoothly with them, then maybe that in itself is a kind of retro-active JUSTIFICATION for them to have pulled you over in the first place. They have the power to pull over anyone for anything, of course they have to or they couldn't act on suspicions. And if you have had to LIE then it meant that you were doing something you SHOULDN'T have and that would be of interest to them.

I've had any number of interesting conversations with police officers where I could quite easily see them tend towards the "It's close enough, let's nick him" kind of attitude if they really wanted to. Fact is, I tell them the truth.

"What speed where you doing there when I pulled you over?"
"I honestly have no idea."

Is that an admission of driving without due care and attention? It could be interpreted as so. Did they have speed-measuring equipment on their vehicle? I have no idea. Probably, because it was a fancy ANPR vehicle with all the cameras and he'd been following me for a while. What happened? Nothing. "Okay, thank you, I'll let you get on your way, sir", after checking documents.

Pulled over after a police car spotted me and obviously "targeted" me from a whole queue of traffic. I'd even tried to let him out in front of me as he was joining traffic and he waved me in front of him, then pulled me over a mile up the road.

"We just pulled you over because your car looks like it's had a hard life, doesn't it, Sir?"
[His colleague walks around the car, inspecting it while we talk]
"Yes, I know. I buy cheap cars and run them into the ground, officer, it's easier than trying to buy a car outright when you have no money. But I have a full MOT here, done yesterday".
[Officer checks paperwork, asks me about my job - IT Manager for a private school, which could probably be assumed that I *could* afford a car, asks me where I'm going, where I've come from, etc.]
"Okay, sir, it says on here that X, Y, Z are advised. You should get them checked out."
[X, Y, Z are not MOT failures, but an MOT pass is not a guarantee of roadworthiness, so advisories are put on for potential roadworthiness issues. He doesn't even bother to look at them]
"Absolutely."
[Officer walks away after a nod from his colleague. Turns back to tell me to be careful when rejoining the road, spots a broken rear light - how the hell it passed MOT I have no idea - and both our eyes are unconsciously drawn to it as he speaks. Officer smiles.]
"Sorry to inconvenience you, sir. It appears you were missing the mandatory duck-tape on the bumper."
[Gets in car, drives off back to the spot he was sitting at before I came past - the duck-tape on the bumper is a reference to the type of car I was driving because you ALWAYS see them in the worst state of repair with bits taped back on]

I got stopped driving back from Europe to the UK late at night. Late, single male in an old, knackered car, was chosen from a line and pulled over for a customs inspection.

I was asked who owned the car (me) and how long (I said about a year). He asked for documentation of the car, it was already on the passenger seat because I had it together with my ticket for the ferry and my passport. (Note, I have no legal requirement to carry anything on my person, not licences, not documentation, nothing, nor to provide them there and then - I believe the law says 48 hours at the police station of my choice - but if I have them, why wouldn't I provide them when asked by a police officer?). The car was actually mine but it was in my ex-wife's name - at a different address - until just a month before when we'd bothered to change it over. That rang an alarm bell but I didn't realise until later why.

I was asked where I'd been. I'd been travelling around Europe with friends. Which friends? One had gone back to Australia, the other two were in Germany still. Contact details? Provided them, they couldn't get through (at 3am, not surprising). Did I have hotel bookings? No, we were doing the hostels at random each night wherever we ended up after a day of driving. Any receipts? No, the agreement was that I drive and pay the fuel, and my friends pay for the hostels and food and stuff. Any credit card receipts? I don't keep them, but we found only one, for fuel, that I found in the side-pocket where I'd just shoved it. Any food, cooking equipment, camping equipment? Just snacks, it wasn't that kind of holiday, we were eating out at restaurants, driving around during the day, and sleeping in the nearest hostel. How long for? The whole month of December. What about Christmas? I came back one day for Christmas and then drove back out to the friends in Germany again (and so have been off work for a month, and flitting back and forth to Europe on a regular basis...). What countries did I go through? France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, all sorts.

So all I had was an old, knackered car with just a backpack in it, no cash, no receipts, no contact with these people I travelled with, not even circumstantial proof of where I'd been for the last month, driving a car across borders for a whole month and then into the UK from the continent (which is a notorious spot to do smuggling of alcohol and other things), in a car which is registered to someone else and which I say I've owned for a long time. Sure, innocent people do that, but not surprisingly, the questions go more in-depth.

Five officers swarm over the car, searching it and I'm asked to get out and sit on a chair next to it and answer some questions. 3am, bloody freezing, middle of winter. At all times, they are polite, and considerate. Why wouldn't they be? Not a pleasant situation, even for them as they search through sweaty unwashed clothes, but they are doing their damn job. Again, I think to myself "Well, yeah, I'd check me too!".

At one point, an officer sits in the open boot (trunk) of the car to have a look inside and I have to say: "Er, sorry, not being funny, but you want to be careful - that door doesn't stay up properly and it might come down on you." They thank me. Then I see their brain ticking over. Then they are unscrewing the boot door panels to see if there's anything inside (no, the gas struts are just weak, so it doesn't stay up, that's all, but again "Yep, I'd check that as well!").

Nothing found, and soon after, I'm apologised to and sent on my way.

I got pulled over driving at 2am over the border to Scotland. Obviously just a "we'll get the tourists" kind of setup (there is no real "border", not a physical one, but the start of Scottish jurisdiction).

Had four people in the car, only one of whom spoke English. Tell them what's happening (relatives from Italy coming to holiday in Scotland with me). "On your way, sir."

Broke down on the motorway. A brake pad retaining mechanism failed without warning and fell into the brake disc (brake pads were about a month old). All I knew was a HUGE clonk and then scraping noises and massive drag and pulling to one side. Pulled the car over, put a hi-vis on, placed a warning triangle, phoned for recovery.

Police car arrives a minute later, after the CCTV operators spot me on camera. Police officer has a word to ask what happens. I tell him the brakes have some kind of failure and I'm not sure I can rely on them to stop or just jam on at any time, so didn't want to go any further. The usual questions, all answered politely. He escorts me around the corner (in a way that I hit him rather than anyone else), where there's a hidden exit and a safe place to wait for recovery. He leaves me there and goes on his way. He could QUITE EASILY have done me for a faulty car, and it could have been CATASTROPHIC if it had fallen slightly differently and pulled the car more, at 70mph, on a busy motorway, and even though I couldn't have seen the problem during normal maintenance.

Nothing, because he saw I was honest, and reasonable, and not causing him trouble.

At any point, I could have screamed and shouted and alleged all sorts of discrimination, or whatever. It wouldn't have helped ANYONE. At any point, the police could be seen to have "reasonable cause" to investigate further or do more. They didn't. At any point, they could have been nasty without even going outside their job specification. They didn't.

So either I found several dozen police officers who are the "nice" ones, waiting for people to drive past and then targeting and collaring me, or most police officers do their job when you are nice and honest with them - even if the information you give them has cause to give them suspicions or even could be used against you. I could have gone for the "silent treatment", of course, at any point. Would it have helped? No, not really.

Don't be a dick to these people. They *CAN* make your life hell if they really want to, by nothing more than their job. And when it's 3am and someone is breaking into my house, or the people in my neighbourhood are rioting and setting houses on fire, they are the ONLY people who have any sort of obligation to turn up and do something about it.

Sure, we can all cite cases where someone was honest and truthful and it cost them, but in the grand scheme of things it's the only common-sense solution.

Be honest. Be truthful. Don't play legal games. But, most importantly, be legal. And then you won't have ANY problems, beyond what you would have had anyway.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

The UK equivalent of "Miranda Rights" (why does everything have to have an unrelated name?) has said:

"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

or words to that effect since about 1912.

Of course you have the right to be silent. And of course the court will be able to draw inferences in the absence of your answers. If you don't speak for a month and then tell police, after hearing all the evidence they have, that fantastical situation X was what you meant all along, then of course it's reasonable to assume that you're just making it up now that you know all the facts and were silent before because it's a fabrication that you didn't have at the time. You have the RIGHT to do that, but it doesn't mean that it won't come back to bite you.

That's been in law since God-knows-when, and the arrest warning is really just a formal restatement so that you aren't tricked into thinking you MUST answer any question a policeman asks you ("Have you stopped beating your wife?" - an unanswerable question either way).

You have the right to remain silent, in any decent first-world legal system. Nowhere does it say that that right is without cost. Or else, you'd never say anything, at all, whatsoever in court and they'd have to convict/release you without your side of the story at all. Similarly you have the right to a lawyer. It doesn't mean you have to have one, have a particular one, or use the incompetent one that they give you.

However, even in a UK court, "Where inferences may be drawn from silence, the court must direct the jury as to the limits to the inferences which may properly be drawn from silence. There may be no conviction based wholly on silence."

Welcome to the 20th/21st Century legal system. If you're stupid enough to stay completely silent and/or not seek legal advice at the first opportunity, that's your problem.

This has been going on for decades. Is this any different to even, say, Windows CE office apps?

MS has a market which it's tried to (or said it's tried to) break out of several times. Hell, it took since Windows XP Tablet Edition for everyone to say "Yeah, that's usable on a tablet now", by which time so many other competitors came and went in the same area that MS are still the outsider. It doesn't really care about / has no clue how to handle other platforms.

It likes Office on desktop because it sells Office and Windows licences. "The Cloud" messed it up for them a bit but now they can sell Office 365 on Windows. Anything outside that remit? Forget it. It's not "real" Windows and they won't dedicate to it (and if you ever see something like the OOXML standards, you'll learn why - they basically created this mess for themselves, deliberately or not).

Office on ANYTHING else is secondary and unimportant and only exists to get some cash and will never be the mainstream product. Hell, I wouldn't even chance my arm on Office 365 on Linux or Mac personally, let alone phones.

Microsoft has one core base that makes it money. Even their consoles have to confirm to that base, basically, because that's the nature of their business. Lip service is sometimes paid to other things but they rarely follow through.

Windows RT on ARM
Windows CE on whatever.
Even mainstream Windows on other architectures died a death.

It's all there. They've had decades of experience on it. They could make just about anything work with enough effort. They were pushing for tablets decades before people were even exposed to usable tablets. But they are only really interested in working on x86-compatibles with all the functionality they can get on them, so they can sell Windows, sell Office and lock you in.

In the tradition of the XKCD cartoon about the Matrix movies...

But, really, they made other sequels?!

Sorry, but T2 was the best. T3 - while I liked the idea of using the Internet being Skynet (clever twisting of an old plot to take account of a new technology that would otherwise be problematic to explain why they DON'T have that in the future of T2), it was lacklustre. The main actor? Not convinced. The baddie? Sure, that was okay, but a mite overpowered with shooting things directly from the body. The "take control of the cars electronics" - stole my damn idea for a story I was writing, but how the hell were they steered? etc. etc. etc.

I didn't even know there was anything after that. Like all things, after X amount of sequels it gets commercialised into TV series and spin-offs and I totally lose interest. Highlander, Matrix, Aliens, etc. all the same. As soon as you get a TV series or crossover of something like that, it's dead. It doesn't matter how many times you bring back the original actor to try to legitimise the spin-off, it's gone.

The problem is, once something spins off into the spin-off abyss, then it dies pretty quickly and never really recovers, but "the fans" (the blindly loyal ones who don't care enough to say "Sorry, that's just wrong even if the same writer wrote it") will make them milk it into oblivion. And then they can "reboot" it. Or pretend a movie never happened. Sigh.

I don't hold out any hope at all. In the meantime, I know what MY Terminator 3 / 4 / 5 and world look like. That's about as much as I can do.

And vinyl sounds better?

I would. Also, do you think Stephen Hawking would go for it?

But more importantly - who the hell is going to run a machine "just for you" forever, and how would they do so? We might be able to fund a genius or two and a celebrity or two might be able to get a few hundred years, but beyond that who's going to solve the practical everyday problem of funding you and then looking after you? And are you going to have the life expectancy of the average electronic product?

And, sorry, but all your experiences - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - have little to do with your body. Your brain experiences because it's instructed to by the laws of physics and it's correlated that to sensations of pain, even emotion. If you can get to the point that you can put "yourself" into a computer, all that has to be connected to something inside the computer too. There's nothing you *can't* experience that way, once you have that kind of technology.

And I don't think fear-of-death is something I'd miss (or that you'd lose - you can still die, even in this highly hypothetical scenario) and the rest - breathing? I'm sure there are any number of people who'd be glad not to have to breath (those in pain, those on iron lungs, etc.) and not be tied to oxygen (even spacefarers!). Everything else is just your brain's reaction to the environment sensed by it. All that love and joy and excitement? Neurons firing and nothing more. Sorry, but it's just your reaction to that particular bunch of neurons firing in that particular way. Nothing "special" or strictly organic there (hell, you can pretty change people's mood by zapping their brain - we call it ECT and use it as a medical treatment even today).

But it's so pie-in-the-sky that it's not worth worrying about in our lifetime anyway. Hell, I doubt my grand-daughter's generation would even have the ability and she doesn't exist yet.

Before we get that far, we need ever-lasting power resources, ever-replenished amounts of resources, insanely complex computers, unbelievable amounts of knowledge of the brain and how it works (of which we have precisely zip so far), the ability to never work again (or have work fund you to do all the above) and a legal framework for it all to happen in.

And the changes implemented by ANY of those things are going to have a greater impact on your life than just about ANYTHING ELSE if they ever come around in your lifetime.

Okay. You can have the right to patent anything you like so long as it only applies to things that you (or someone else) makes an actual, physical circuit to do.

So all those people running software on general purpose processors are not hindered in one bit and can replicate your methods (note: not necessarily your exact work) to their heart's content.

That's basically the situation specified and if you can't see how that differs from, say, someone patenting some obscure part of MPEG decompression and suing, say, VideoLAN for it, then you probably shouldn't be a patent lawyer.

Yes, all computer programs are Turing-compatible (if you like) and you can implement a computer using wooden blocks that modify a flow of water if you really wanted to - it's not hard. But the fact is that your patent shouldn't cover such a general range of specified equipment that nobody can ever use your technique on a general purpose computer.

What you've found isn't a "loophole", it's exactly the narrowing that someone has deliberately introduced. Patent holders will now be able to patent "an electrical circuit that does X" (maybe, possibly, if they jump through lots of hoops and nobody ever discovers their PUBLISHED patent and reimplements it somehow else) but not "any program on a general purpose computer that does X".

It's the right fix. It allows someone to invent, say, ABS and protect that invention. But it prevents someone from "inventing", say, a way to compress files by looking for common strings and building an index. Sure, you can make a computer that does the same as the circuit part of the ABS system, but you CAN'T make it actually control an ABS system without hitting the patent.

1) Those steps aren't "easy". They involve conscious, thoughtful decisions at every point in your life and no mistakes.
2) That doesn't stop you appearing - in fact, it makes you more suspicious and thus worth investigating. Absence of data is a data point in itself - any old spy movie would tell you that. The guy who exists but has no records, no data, no phone? Yeah, we'll look into him first.
3) You're paranoid if you ACTUALLY do that.
4) As someone whose just trawled their Slashdot history going back years while looking for a particular post I made, I can tell you that I've crowed on these forums multiple times about everything from Guantanamo Bay, the government treatment of Alan Turing, the fact that I have an interest in cryptography, the stupidity of people who can't work out to encrypt data properly, even "potential terrorist scenarios" (i.e. if terrorists are so bright, why did they do X, leave trail Y, or not do Z?).

If the above targets me for interest, then I would be in deep, deep trouble already. Maybe I have been flagged already. Who cares? The fact is that I'm not doing anything that any random, thoughtful person isn't doing anyway - and I have zero intention of causing harm. And it's basically my country's intelligence services job TO FIND THINGS EXACTLY LIKE THAT, but most importantly to SORT THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF.

I once considered applying for jobs with MI5 and GCHQ. I'm a maths and computer science graduate, with an interest in cryptography, and they were advertising positions for exactly that. It seemed like an avenue worth looking into.

I didn't, mainly because 1) I disagree with militarisation of anything I do (a conscientious objector, you could say) and 2) I disagree with an awful lot of the military decisions made by my country (still "backing" the US and their illegal torture programs in Guantanamo, for instance - OOPS! I did it again!). Though I love the work of Turing, I don't love that it probably ended up, indirectly, killing people too. Sinking U-boats, things like that. Yeah, they were the enemy, and it was better than the alternative (i.e. more people dying), but still it's military action.

But if I'd applied seriously, with those organisations I would quite expected someone to dig around on the net and find these things out about me by themselves. That's their damn job, and they wouldn't want to be letting people like me in - people who place their own morals above that of orders from above. If someone tells me "shoot/kidnap/kill/injure him", my first question would be "What? Why? Is he about to do the same to me?" (unless I'm playing Counterstrike, in which case he'll be missing his head before you finished the sentence).

This is what they do. This is what they have to do. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. It's very easy to get the wrong people into a place that you don't want them to be. Hell, there's a CIA agent in the news at the moment telling everyone their secrets because he disagrees with how they function. That could be me, in the same position.

You have nothing to fear but driving yourself crazy trying to avoid the things you fear. "I don't like surveillance" leading to absolute paranoia that infests your daily life and stops you meeting up with friends? Yeah, the worst of two evils, I think.

That's not to say that I support a surveillance state (but, if I support ANY element of a surveillance state, it's to have constant, recorded surveillance of police and military procedures so that there is NO element of doubt when it comes to questions of justice being served and law enforcement following the law - hell, what I wouldn't give to have proper footage of some of the greater terrorist incidents that have been reported released, and even parts of the "war on terror"), or spying, or anything else.

There's a lot more wrong in this world than a few cameras here and there. In fact, I'd say there aren't ENOUGH cameras in the right places. Imagine how different the world would be right now if everyone in Gauntanamo had had their evidence, arrest and subsequent imprisonment and (non-)trials recorded and then disseminated to the public. We'd literally be talking a world power being condemned even further, allies disowning it, and maybe even people actually SEEING what a terrorist was planning rather than just being told to believe.

Give me surveillance. In the right places. But leave me to get on with my life without developing paranoia to a state of mental illness, thanks.

Almost all the countries below the half-way-mark on that table are the former Russian states or their immediate neighbours. It's hardly surprising.

And, despite being in the EU, all these places have their own economies. If you force a minimum wage of the UK on, say, Armenia, then employers will have to pay 26 times more on the minimum wage than they do now. In case you don't know, that would basically mean about 20 times more unemployed as a consequence.

There is nothing stopping those people migrating to other EU countries that will take them (open market! For the most part, except where countries are in such a bad economic state that other EU countries won't allow them to emigrate to the rest of the EU), or in campaigning to get the minimum wage to the same levels.

And minimum wage is a bad indicator, average wage would be better. A country that states a £1 an hour minimum wage would not necessarily have anyone working for that, especially if it's 26 times below the cost of living there.

And, sorry, but the cost of living in places in the "top" half of that table (sorted by minimum wage in Euros) is significantly higher than those in the bottom half.

The EU is not there to make us all earn the same, do the same, work the same. It's there to work together, and there's a difference. The UK, for instance, pays a greater proportion of certain subsidies (e.g. farming subsidies) to other countries than the rest of the EU. Something like 2-3 times more, per person, than other countries that reap the benefits of the subsidies.

Nobody said the EU is there to make everyone the same. It's there to make everyone work together to help each other. Which means that some countries have weaknesses and strengths and some countries are in a weaker position than others and is helped out a little.

Are you honestly trying to say that someone in Maldova should be guaranteed the same minimum as someone in the UK is, just because they are in the EU? There's more factors to take account of than that. If you really want something to moan about, look at people who work in the UK, gain benefits they wouldn't be entitled to in their home (EU) country, and then send them back home. Is that really fair? Those who can afford to have a cousin living in the UK getting "free money" (not to mention healthcare, etc.) than those who don't can't get?

Stuff that sinks, sinks.

Quite what were they expecting? Rubbish like tyres and ropes (i.e. stuff that sinks), which are disposed of in/around water will end up at the bottom of the water. Is this shocking?

Sea animals might become trapped in it. Not news. Sea animals might use it. Not news.

Quite what is the point? To make those of us who DON'T realise what millions of tons of junk does when you throw it in an ocean think bad of themselves?

And, to be honest, on the sea-floor it's more likely to be buried than it is to decay. That's probably a good thing for the life down there. In a few million years it'll be rock again.

Are these "scientists" genuinely astonished that they discovered this rather than the alternative (which is presumably that there's no rubbish down there at all?). I was taught that dense stuff sinks back in primary school.

Actually, I've not even touched an original XBox in my entire life. Not once. Ever. Don't use XBox Live as a consequence of that, and don't pay for gaming subscriptions (have a Steam account... is that allowed? Never had a monthly-subscription to anything but New Scientist magazine - paper edition -, though).

So, if no-one has yet taken apart the Kinect 2, how the hell is any of your argument about it NOT nonsense?

Ignoring the rife paranoia...

"NSA spying on all electronic communication is (very) old news."

If so, why do they need to order Verizon to do it? And can I finally tell all those people who talk about the "acres of supercomputers analysing every phone call" to shut the hell up now? If they already have that access, why are they asking for it? And if they ask for it now but we "all knew" they have it already, what's the story, why is this controversial, why should it be news?

Or maybe, just maybe, the government are pretty damn inept unless they are following you specifically and then doing things like tapping YOUR phone is probably better than any underground datacenter with ENORMOUS power draws and analysis code on that scale. And to find out who to follow? They track contacts of known people, and ask for phone records of people they already know. You know, good old-fashioned spying and intelligence. Rather than a blind statistical hunt through a billion innocent records.

Fact is, even if they are doing what you said, the amount of value they get out for what they put in is horrendously pathetic (i.e. they'd been watching the Boston bombers and didn't know anything was going on). If all that Kinect bollocks is anywhere near true (it isn't), then just by the number of Kinects experiencing false positives, you've probably made more time wasted than you'd ever recover.

If nothing else, that's what you should be protesting about. A return to good-old-policing, where people used their 'intelligence' in all senses of the word, not needle-in-a-haystack hunts.

But, honestly, you're talking bollocks. People have taken apart Kinects and even USB-traced them, and people are constantly putting both PC's and XBox's through network packet capture. If there's anything dodgy there, it would be noticed pretty quickly.

But the simplest thing - it comes back to the "acres of supercomputers" argument. Even if they WERE capturing all this data, they certainly don't have the time to analyse it or the manpower to catch up with all the BILLIONS of false positives that such a system would generate.

So maybe it's just a games console. And like every military intelligence agency in the world, they don't mind you spreading bollocks so long as you don't know what it is they ACTUALLY do. And they are liable to be doing very, very little compared to this kind of paranoia, just through sheer time, money and manpower costs.

A username/password is different.

This is a flaw in a system. It's the difference between "Joe Blogg's car has code XXXX" and "All Fords let you in if you do XXXX". The personalisation of the information brings it under different laws - and preventing people from discussing flaws will also stop people from, for example, discussing faults in systems (e.g. cars that have faulty brakes etc.) which brings about whole new levels of capability for companies to forgo their responsibilities and claim they didn't know about it.

However, if you think your garage door openers and information on how to bypass them, copy them, fake them, scan them, intercept them, etc. isn't already on the Internet, you're being naive. Same for car locks.

It's not illegal to discuss a particular encryption system used on a satellite TV system, for example, or it's weaknesses or how it can be bypassed. It's not even illegal to take apart the box and try it. It's definitely a grey legal area, though, to do so with the intention of infringing copyright (but how do you prove that?), or selling "cracked" boxes onto other users. Also, it is illegal to distribute, say, Sky's satellite codes that allow you to decrypt their channels.

You don't want to stop people investigating and finding and discussing flaws in systems. The knock-on effects are huge and not even constrained to IT systems (i.e. if someone's voting system is vulnerable, you wouldn't be able to report that, and nobody would ever know). The law in almost all countries takes the middle line - you can discuss flaws inherent in the system, but you can't go providing information specifically tailored so that random people can use to access random people's accounts.

This exploit has C code. Go compile it. See how it works. Get a working binary. All legal. Distribute it? Legal. Sneak it onto someone's machine? Illegal. Get someone to run it with the intention of accessing things you shouldn't? Illegal. Anything already "bad" is covered. Making more steps along the way illegal just has too much of an impact elsewhere on things that you WANT happening.

If you're flying ANYTHING in a manner where a millisecond response time matters, you're flying wrong. If you're flying CLOSE ENOUGH to things that a millisecond error in your response is critical, you're flying too close or completely off the flight plan.

This is why we don't take chances with air-traffic-control. It's not unusual for planes to be MILES away from each other and still be called a "near miss". At the sorts of speeds you're talking about, you cover WAY TOO MUCH space too quickly to be able to "get out of the way" - you should just not be within miles of each other.

As such, even UAV's are subject to the same kinds of safety distances. This one obviously a) wasn't on a flightplan, b) was straying off its flightplan or c) was misdirected by (or ignorant of) the local equivalent of air-traffic-control.

One day a drone will hit a passenger-carrying aircraft. One day a passenger jet will take off with both engines hatches undone, causing an engine failure and potential fire in both engines when it snaps off and damages the engine (London Heathrow, last week). One day someone will get on a plane and bomb it (not 9/11 - think Lockerbie back in the 1980's!). These things will all happen. The way we reduce casualties is NOT to ban planes (although, obviously, that works perfectly!!), but to apply controls. In this case, the controls already exist and are in place. If people didn't follow them? Take away their UAV pilot's licence.

Smaller competitors who want to get into the market. Effectively, price controls like this will freeze out the competition. How? Well, say Apple are making 200% profit on everything they sell because they have price-fixed. You now can sell at 200% profit and compete with them (and thus become part of the cartel yourself), or you can try to undercut them. But they have a huge market, to themselves, with huge profit margins, complete control of the market (because they are all agreeing to price at whatever they want) and lots and lots and lots of spare cash to keep you out / buy you up.

Because of this, you also get a lack of competition (what's the point of competing if you can all agree to just set prices to X and no-one "wins" the market for having a better product?), the market stagnates and the customer gets screwed - not by the raised prices (as you say, that's up to the customer) but because the market is so closed that they either pay lots or DON'T get the products at all. It's also a pretty good way to kill off the technology and (thus) competitors who rely on book sales to sell reading devices, etc.

A company sets its own prices. That much is certain. But they should not be getting into groups and DECIDING how much the customer pays between them collectively, with no reference to how much it costs to supply the product itself, and no consumer interest. It's illegal for a reason. It destroy markets, stifles innovation, removes competition, and makes everything a big game to make money with no regard to consumers at all. And, at the end of the day, it becomes "pay lots, or get nothing", which isn't a technique that benefits taxpayers either. Yes, you get greater tax revenue from profits (you hope!), but you also get less people spending money and less money available to spend on other things for those that do.

The point is that the market is bigger than a company, even a government. Harming the market DIRECTLY harms the stability of the economies of world governments. Thus it is illegal.

There's nothing stopping a company with a patent licensing its patent ONLY for 10 bajillion dollars even though it costs next to nothing to manufacture. That's just business. Nobody's stopping that. But colluding with competitors to price other competitors and your own customers out of the market is in nobody's interest - not even the companies that do it, or their shareholders!