It costs very little to cool one or two rooms just enough to be pleasant.

We actively work to prevent anyone with a suspended license from using the road, so does it follow that failing to do the same for convicted rapists is a bad thing?

I don't think "Facebook should allow all content that is within the bounds of the law of the local jurisdiction" is stupid at all. Ideally that's how infrastructure-esque operations should conduct themselves.

For slow moving objects and an entrenched position there actually are but I have no idea how expensive it is to operate them nor what the practical constraints of deploying them might be.

> ban them now and make them hard to get, otherwise it's gonna start looking like that youtube video "Slaughterbots" really, really quick

I think you're forgetting the part where committing the crime is easy(ish) but covering your trail is nearly impossible. Most people aren't willing to martyr themselves for some abstract team red vs team blue extremist political nonsense that isn't severely impacting their day to day lives or the well being of their families.

It's vaguely similar to the reason that no one sabotages power stations. It's comparatively easy to do but carries severe downsides if caught and approximately no upside for the perpetrator regardless.

I never claimed that - you aren't engaging with what I actually wrote.

I questioned the usefulness of such data in the general case. I also pointed out that in the rare cases where such data for a small area would prove useful it would be trivial to collect (on account of being a small area).

Just what sort of resolution do you believe is necessary or useful for drone warfare or other military uses? What do you have in mind here? Regardless, if I (a civilian) can afford the equipment and plane ticket to collect a LiDAR point cloud of a monument approximately anywhere in the world then any well funded actor can also send a "tourist" to do the same.

For that matter I don't think you even need LiDAR. Photogrammetry techniques can achieve arbitrarily high spatial resolution proportional to that of the input data. LiDAR just has some advantages if you're considering deploying on a wide scale or for certain realtime or power constrained tasks. Generally none of that applies to state actors.

To be clear I'm not claiming in one direction or the other. I feel that if you're going to attempt to discredit a piece of work it's on you to do such a basic check.

Really the whole point of that xkcd was to viscerally illustrate the practical effect of binary misclassification, or alternatively to make the point that a p of 0.05 isn't necessarily as rigorous as you might expect. Neither of those things directly applies here.

It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.

The cherry on top is how utterly unenforceable (in a practical non-proliferation sense) the bulk of the regulations are. Strap a microcontroller dev board to anything sufficiently lightweight and it can become a drone. The most expensive part of a DIY heavy lift build that breaks ~all the rules is probably the props.

> Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them.

sounds like you're describing a paperclip maximizer and drives home the importance of zoning (or rather land allocation and geographical coordination) as a general concept.