Thousands of businesses could receive clearance to fly drones two years from now under proposed rules that the Federal Aviation Administrationunveiled Sunday, a landmark step that will make automated flight more commonplace in the nation’s skies.
Meanwhile, the White House on Sunday issued presidential directive that will require federal agencies for the first time to publicly disclose where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.
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The FAA’s draft rules would make it relatively simple for real estate agents, aerial photographers, police departments, farmers and anyone else to fly small drones for work purposes. Operators would need to pass a written proficiency test, register the drone and pay about $200 in fees — but would not have to obtain a regular pilot’s license or demonstrate their flying skills.
Federal judge in Texas blocks Obama immigration orders →
A federal judge in Texas last night temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s executive actions on immigration. The judge, responding to a suit filed by 26 Republican-run states, did not rule on the legality of immigration orders but said there was sufficient merit to the challenge to warrant a suspension while the case goes forward.
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The Obama orders would offer a legal reprieve to the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have resided in the country for at least five years. This would remove the constant threat of deportation. Many could also receive work permits.
They would also expand the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allows certain young people who arrived in the United States illegally as children to apply for two-year work permits and exemptions from deportation.
Some 4 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants were said to be potentially eligible to benefit from the executive actions.
Someone (probably the NSA) has been hiding viruses in hard drive firmware →
The NSA may be hiding payloads in the firmware of consumer hard drives, according to a new report from Kaspersky Lab...
If true, the program would give the NSA unprecedented access to the world's computers, even when disconnected from the larger web. Viruses stored on a hard drive's firmware are typically activated as soon as a device is plugged in, with no further action required. They're also usually undetectable and survive reformatting, making them difficult to detect and remove. In July, independent researchers discovered a similar exploit targeting USB firmware — dubbed BadUSB — but there was no indication of the bugs being developed and deployed at this scale.
It also raises real questions about device manufacturers' complicity in the program...
Transparency is coming to those political attack ads on cable TV →
The FCC is proposing new laws that would force cable TV operators and radio broadcasters to publish information online about who buys political ad time and for how much. The legislation would make it much easier for media watchdogs, concerned citizens, and journalists to track political spending across the country and would be an important tool for political transparency — especially as campaigns begin using more and more targeted ads to win over voters.
The Many Causes of America’s Decline in Crime →
So incarceration skyrocketed and crime was in free fall. But conflating simple correlation with causation in this case is a costly mistake. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, called What Caused the Crime Decline? finds that increasing incarceration is not the answer. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the foreword, “This prodigious rate of incarceration is not only inhumane, it is economic folly.”
Our team of economic and criminal justice researchers spent the last 20 months testing fourteen popular theories for the crime decline. We delved deep into over 30 years of data collected from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. The results are sharply etched: We do not know with precision what caused the crime decline, but the growth in incarceration played only a minor role, and now has a negligible impact.
...We find that this growth in incarceration was responsible for approximately 5 percent of the drop in crime in the 1990s. (This could vary from 0 to 10 percent.) Since then, however, increases in incarceration have had essentially zero effect on crime. The positive returns are gone. That means the colossal number of Americans cycling in and out of prisons and jails over the last 13 years was not responsible for any meaningful fraction of the drop in crime.
...Incarceration is not just any government policy. Mass incarceration comes at an incredible cost. "A year in prison can cost more than a year at Harvard," Stiglitz points out. Taxpayers spend $260 billion a year on criminal justice. And there will continue to be less and less to show for it, as more people are incarcerated.
There are significant human costs as well—to individuals, families, communities, and the country. Spending a dollar on prisons is not the same as spending it on public television or the military. Prisons result in an enormous waste of human capital. Instead of so many low-level offenders languishing behind bars, they could be earning wages and contributing to the economy. Incarceration is so concentrated in certain communities that it has disrupted the gender balance and marriage rates. The costs are intergenerational. There are 2.7 million minor children with a parent behind bars. More than 1 in 9 black children have a parent incarcerated.
Research also shows that incarceration can actually increase future crime. Criminologists call this the “criminogenic effect” of prison. It is particularly powerful on low-level offenders. Once individuals enter prison, they are surrounded by other prisoners who have often committed more serious and violent offenses. Prison conditions also breed violent and anti-social behavior. Former prisoners often have trouble finding employment and reintegrating into society due to legal barriers, social stigma, and psychological scarring from prison. Approximately 600,000 prisoners reenter society each year. Those who can find employment earn 40 percent less than their peers, and 60 percent face long-term unemployment. Researchers estimate that the country’s poverty rate would have been more than 20 percent lower between 1980 and 2004 without mass incarceration.
Why Hacking the Atmosphere Won't Happen Any Time Soon →
It’s worth spending some more time on the National Academy of Sciences reports on geoengineering prospects and concerns — the concerns mainly being about adding sun-blocking particles to the atmosphere to counteract global warming driven by the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
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Pierrehumbert’s prime concern (there are plenty more, all legitimate) is that any sun-blocking intervention done at climate scale would have to continue unabated for millenniums, or until CO2 removal was in high gear — or risk climatic whiplash if veils of reflective materials dissipated.
That should be enough to deter any countries from going global with such efforts.
But I’ve long seen plenty of other reasons why this is almost assuredly a nonstarter in any case. The main one is diplomatic, not technological. Who sets the thermostat?
Canada's Right-to-Die Ruling May Fuel U.S. Movement: Experts →
The Canadian Supreme Court's reversal of a 21-year ban on doctor-assisted death offers a bold, new legal argument that could propel the American movement—in short: Aid-in-dying is pro-life, activists assert.
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To qualify for assisted dying in Canada, an individual must be a consenting, mentally competent adult with a "grievous and irremediable" condition that causes "endless suffering," physical or psychological, the court said.
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"People [in most states] who are terminally ill and looking forward to some sort of horrific symptoms before they die are forced to end their lives prematurely … while they can still boost themselves over the balcony or in front of the train or put a gun in in their mouths," Coombs Lee told NBC News.
If death-with-dignity was legal across the U.S., those people might live longer, knowing they could have a "peaceful aid-in-dying option," she said. "It prolongs lives, pure and simple."
Only five U.S. states allow aid-in-dying: Oregon, Washington and Vermont by legislation; and Montana and New Mexico by court rulings currently being challenged. Forty states explicitly ban the practice.
New Evidence that Half of America is Broke →
I'm unsure of the reliability of these statistics, but they would not surprise me.