No criminal charges for him or his partner, who started blasting too. The first one resigned after the sheriff’s internal affairs investigation told him that he did an oopsie.
Inhale vegetables explained half of it. The other half are two memes about Taylor Swift. One is the right-wing conspiracy that she’s secretly a far left agent (and thus might have an interest in things like “ACAB” and getting cops fired). The other is criticism of her for her environmental impact by virtue of how much she flies everywhere in a private jet (you may have seen a bunch of other memes on your Lemmy front page entitled "TayTay on her way to…” showing her private jet).
The other bit of this is that Taylor Swift sent a C&D letter to Jack Sweeney who is the guy who has been publishing flight paths of various celebrities. Sweeney obtains this data publicly because since 2020 all aircraft (with few exceptions) are required to use ADS-B transponders. The ADS-B system has numerous safety benefits compared to previous systems, but a side effect is that every aircraft now constantly broadcasts its position, velocity, and altitude information, and anybody who wants to can build a ground station capable of receiving this information.
Generally, threatening legal action against somebody who isn’t doing anything wrong or illegal is considered a dick move, and puts Taylor Swift in the same category as Elon Musk (who has also previously threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney). So we are proceeding to make fun of her without remorse, as it was her decision in the first place to fly privately, which is very bad for the environment.
Instead of threatening to sue the guy who’s breaking no laws and publishing information that is already public, she could just consider another mode of transit if privacy is that important to her. But in the meantime we will enjoy the memes
every aircraft now constantly broadcasts its position, velocity, and altitude information, and anybody who wants to can build a ground station capable of receiving this information.
Isn’t this a pretty serious security concern? What if some armed group gets their hands on these real-time aircraft flight paths?
The exceptions to ADS-B requirements include military aircraft. Awhile back a friend and I were in the Nevada desert and some F-35s buzzed past us at only a few hundred feet. I was curious about the flight so I checked ADS-B exchange, and sure enough there was no trace of it. Friend got a cool picture though.
Ignoring the fact that everyone has their hands on these flight paths because it’s publicly available data, what if they did? Genuinely, what do you think is the worst that can happen?
You know militaries don’t need publicly available flight tracking to shoot down planes, right? Like, they have machines that tell them exactly where everything in the air near them is all the time.
Plus, airlines literally post departure and arrival times on the internet as part of their business model. Even if you didn’t know exactly where the plane was and when, you could make a pretty educated guess based on that information.
That wasn’t a military. It was a separatist group. My concern is that broadcasting your location significantly reduces the difficulty in shooting you down, to the point some armed group can do it.
Even the older Mode C/S transponders broadcast altitude, and passive radar could probably get you position. As I understand it, ADS-B doesn’t add a ton that wasn’t already available (from the point of view of a terrorist), but it does eliminate the need for radar, and includes ICAO hex codes that make it easier to uniquely identify an aircraft.
To shoot down a plane flying at 33,000 feet you’d need a surface-to-air missile system and a few missiles. Looks like the system used to shoot down MH17 cost ballpark of $100m, possibly more. Missiles are around $200k each.
You get target tracking and missile control radar included for free in your mobile SAM. At that point ADS-B is probably redundant, though I guess it could help you track the plane before it enters your airspace.
Though, really, where an airplane is going is usually not a secret. In most cases a flight plan will be filled (unless VFR). And there are other sources for near-realtime and realtime flight path information, including directly from the FAA.
You could also hire spotters with binoculars just to confirm that the plane is headed towards your mobile SAM.
Or, once the flight plan is filled and the departure time is confirmed, just stand outside the airport with a shoulder mounted missile launcher.
It’s not just about making fun of her. You’re leaving out a very important part.
It’s also about making fun of the conspiracy nut jobs that think the Superbowl was rigged and that Swift was behind the whole thing, which is the premise behind her plane being the one that dropped the acorn
Every motorized form of transportation requires publicly-visible identifying information on the vehicle.
If she were traveling by car, anyone who had cameras watching roads could report everywhere she went.
I hope you can see how that would be the same process of collecting and then publishing public information, and how it might still be worthy of a lawsuit given how a record of everywhere someone’s car has driven to is creepy.
This take is hot off the press and I haven’t really thought it through, and you can call me an extremist if you want, but billionaires don’t deserve privacy
Who even knows. Republicans are always attacking NASA. At various points because it was “woke”, or researching climate change, or an easy target for budget cuts.
They believe leaving space to private companies results in greater success
Personally I think if the government taxed all these billionaires the equivalent to what they spent on space then NASA would be ahead of all of them but I don’t make policy
Centuries from now, some historian is going to dig up a dusty ass old hard drive, and find this image on it. There will be experts in internet meme history that they will take this meme to, who will be able to identify the exact week that it was posted based on the archaeological record of acorn cop and Taylor Swift jet memes
‘Sup future people! Btw all that other shit in the news is really happening! It isn’t some War of the Worlds confusion or running joke or something like that.
My thought process was that if the future people exist and have the means to read these comments, they could be from one of the timelines where civilized minds won out. Plenty of the bad timelines won’t have anybody there to read these words. :/
And for the unaware, he likely resigned so he couldn’t be forced to aid in his own prosecution. Basically, a police department can force an officer to testify against themselves as long as they want to remain a cop. The department basically goes “we’re making your testimony a condition of your ongoing employment. So testify or be fired.” As long as he remains a cop, he doesn’t have a 5th amendment right to remain silent.
By quitting, he’s able to clam up and not aid in any investigation. And since he was given the option to resign instead of being fired, he can simply wait for it to blow over then get the same job in the next city over.
The fact that there’s an investigation to be done is why I fucking hate cops. What investigation? He was literally caught on his own camera trying to murder an innocent person. An acorn hit the car? Fuck kind of excuse is that? I would get the death penalty if I killed someone with that pitiful excuse. People who are given a position of authority over others should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. I’ll never trust a cop for as long as I live because of this shit.
That’s why there’s an “investigation.” Because The SCOTUS was lied to, unintentionally by anyone alive at the time, in 1982 during Harlow V Fitzgerald.
Holy fucking shit, I hadn’t actually seen the video until now. I’d put a bullet in my brain if I had to live with that embarrassment. At least Taylor Swift is richer than God and she can just pay someone else to feel bad about flying everywhere.
I still can’t believe that there are not just a few, but many cops that such bad trigger discipline and common sense. This guy shouldn’t be allowed near any guns, let alone as a police officer.