1. There is evidence that drones exist.

2. The reports are being made by qualified recognised professionals, who are, at the time of reporting, clearly in good health, good state of mind, and sober (or they would not be in command of an aircraft).

3. The reports are sometimes made in real-time (pilots reporting to ATC over radio whilst on approach), or very shortly after the incident.

4. The reports are detailed (in some cases even describing the colour of the drone).

5. The incidents are backed up by secondary reports: e.g. drones being reported around an airport without necessarily causing an airprox incident.

All that said, perhaps better data would help document the degree of risk. The drones that are directly radio-controlled (rather than having a programmed flight-plan) will usually operate on a small set of standard frequencies, which could be monitored and recorded. Add some video surveillance, and this could add more documentary evidence to the reports.

> mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos or radar

You are quite right to refer to UFO reports that came from highly qualified pilots, etc. Those were reports made by highly trained professionals, with lots of detail, etc.

I would counter that by saying that pilots in that era were encouraged to report any strange/unidentified experience. So they genuinely reported anything that could add weight - either for or against - such as lightning strikes, odd cloud formations, odd solar events, etc.

And those UFO sightings were specifically things that, despite all the detail, were, by definition, not identifiable. And given the description of most of the objects, they would have expected them to show up on radar (given the described size, and the understanding of radar at the time…it's quite possible that a combination of new stealth technology and the era's radar limitations obscured this possibility).

The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were unidentified: the pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world experience.

I'm sure that during that era there were also all sorts of airprox events that were recorded, but didn't necessarily have all that much follow-up since, simply because the circumstances were clear and identifiable.

In these drone reports, the pilots have clearly and succinctly identified the issue.

It's one thing to report vague lights, and suggest it may be a UFO (because there's nothing to identify what Flying Object might be causing the lights); it's a very different case to very accurately describe a drone, report it as a drone, and have strong correlation with other reports of drone flights near that airfield.

I really wouldn't give too much credence to the lack of photos or radar.

As mentioned before, the dimensions of most drones preclude detection on most radar (not that they can't be detected, but that most radar systems will filter them out as noise), and the fact that almost all commercial jets don't have a set of dashboard cams, that gives enough reason to understand why there isn't an overwhelming wealth of evidence for drone airprox events.

There were no real-world experiences of UFOs, but it's not correct to say that pilots didn't know what to expect -- flying saucers with a very specific description were a well-established part of popular culture. A saucer-shaped object at a great distance that moved quickly, made sharp turns which would be impossible for a fixed-wing aircraft, and which would eventually disappear as if it had moved straight away at high speed, was the standard description. It would have been in the mind of any pilot, and indeed exactly that description popped up innumerable times in the UFO reports.

The primary surveillance radars at airports are unlikely to detect an object as small as these, they just don't reflect enough and I suspect even if observed they would be ignored by software because of their small size and low speeds (basically, they do not look or act like airplanes).

The secondary surveillance radar, which is now the main system used by ATC, would be completely blind to them, as it relies on active equipment being installed in the aircraft. Requiring the installation of transponders in drones might be tempting, but they are large and expensive compared to a quadcopter, so it's impractical.

This feels like the sort of limitation that will disappear given a few more years of electronic miniaturization. Drones aren't going away, so it would be wise to start work on incorporating them into ATC systems sooner rather than later.

Interesting factoid: The new regulations put into place last year by the South African civil aviation authority mandates transponders for drones entering restricted/controlled airspace.

Apparently, there are commercial transponders in place that comply with the specs required, but are prohibitively expensive. At least, compared to most consumer drones.

If the anti-inclusion folks were merely "publicly expressing market preferences" they wouldn't be so furious about how LambdaConf managed to find enough funding to keep going. They're already not going, and they've said so loudly and publicly, right? So why are they so bothered that anyone is going, that the conference continues to exist at all?

It's not about justice; it's about power. Simple as that. It's not enough to not attend a talk by Yarvin, or even to not go to a conference he's attending; it's about making sure he can't speak, anywhere, pour encourager les autres.

So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend. I feel, as many others do, that I have a right to use my voice and whatever influence the market has ill-advisedly allocated to me to assert my point of view.

Lambdaconf appears to believe strongly in their point of view. That's fine. If anyone's advocating criminalizing bad decisions about conference speaker slots, well, I'm not on board for that.

You are of course welcome to use your own speech to argue that I should shut up, or that Aphyr should or that Steve Klabnik should shut up, or whatever. You can also use your speech rights to find ridiculous people on Twitter and Tumblr to compare me with. You're allowed to ask for things you're not going to get.

Unlike people like Klabnik and Aphyr, who are to some extent engaged in "functional programming" as its own thing, I'm not so much motivated by the future of Lambdaconf. My motivation for being involved in this discussion is different and nerdier. I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating. That's all!

Did you just imply that I'm a nerd?

Lucky for you the d20 I rolled to see if I was offended came up 20 so I am not.

If you want to complain loudly about the conference as you don't attend, go for it. But once you're pressuring sponsors into pulling out, once you're running a weeks-long harassment campaign against the organizers, and especially once you're pitching a fit about the conference managing to find other funding despite your best efforts, that goes way, way, way beyond mere complaining. You are making an affirmative effort to prevent the conference from happening at all, and at the very least I'd suggest that you own it.

Using violence to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Abusing a monopoly, or colluding with peers to create an abusive cartel, to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Lying to coercively trick people into a preferred outcome is wrong. None of that is happening here.

If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

There's a perfectly coherent intellectual framework that sees the divestiture movement as wrong, too, but we're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that.

That one went by a little quick for me. Some tactics worked on apartheid, so it can also be used to sabotage a conference with a racist speaker? Maybe so, but that's a pretty big leap without explanation.

Those actions by themselves are not necessarily right or wrong; it's the reason for the action which makes the difference.

It was right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany's campaign of conquest. It would not be right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe because of someone jaywalking in Berlin.

It was right to mount a boycott campaign of South Africa and call the rulers of South Africa racists in order to end apartheid. Is it right to mount a boycott campaign against LambdaConf and call its organizers racists because in a blind evaluation they selected a speaker whose personal politics, which will not be touched on in any way at the convention, you find repellent?

We're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that. More accurately, you are unlikely to have a productive discussion in any context whatsoever, because you will be unable to evaluate ideas outside the context of the man who holds them.

My feelings about De Goes, who I have barely paid any attention to up until this recent slapfight, are much more complicated (and boring) than that.

Other people may have called Lambdaconf itself racist.

Given how De Goes handled this, I'm not surprised.

The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

We live in a culture where people have been primed to go nuclear, not just at the tiniest slight against them, but at the faintest media-driven rumor that some other person somewhere, who may not even exist, may have in theory been slighted. If those people cause drama, it is the fault of those people, not anyone else.

For starters, how does De Goes benefit from generating this drama? Most of the sponsors pulled out and he's been smeared as a racist from one end of the Internet to the other, in an era where that accusation is literally career-ending. Do you really think he decided to blow up LambdaConf in an enormous suicide bomb, and that all the fellow conference managers were okay with that?

It's really easy to forget this. Ads can be a good thing! Anyone ever pick up Computer Shopper magazine in the '90s? It was a giant phonebook full of practically nothing but ads for computer hardware and software. And not only did people voluntarily read it, they paid money for the privilege, because it was useful to them.

So as long as no one gets vicious I think it's ok.

How about if nobody gets punched. Don't roll out demeaning stereotypes against any groups; instead, treat people like human beings. Who knows, it might work out!

/s

Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives.

What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else?

If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.