Here's one of the problems with MANPADS (MAN-Portable Air Defense Systems). When you're holding one, your eyes are pretty much all you have to go on for determining friend from foe, and you are your own command chain. So if 90% of the people carrying those missiles around are calm of mind and sharp of eye, you still get 10% of them who may well shoot at anything with wings.

No, it doesn't. In this case, what he'd be getting paid for has nothing to do with his crimes whatsoever. This isn't about him having sold the rights to his life story, it's about a video game using his likeness and name in a fictitional manner without paying for the right to leverage his public image. Also, it can also be posited (debate whether it's valid or not) that some may believe that some components of the video game have a basis in real life, and thus it would be a form of libel as well. Though, speaking for myself, I'm not sure what about the game was so bad that it'd be worse than what the truth was.

I don't think you read what I said correctly. They didn't just devalue the notes; they devalued the currency . In other words, they increased the cost of everything/decreased the value of all money by 100-fold. And my response was to someone saying that there's no way that The Powers That Be can do anything to eradicate cash, essentially.

I see a lot of people arguing that "it wouldn't be a good idea to do that." Yeah, no shit :) My point is that it's possible, regardless of how dumb it would be to do.

Actually, yeah they can. North Korea did just this...to all the money in everyone's wallet...when they decided that the black market had gotten too powerful. They demoted the value of the won (their currency) by two orders of magnitude...and gave everyone only a week to change their currency in for the new notes, after which time the old notes would not be worth the paper they were printed on.

Now here's the part where you say "But that's North Korea!" right on the heels of everyone claiming that the reason to go cashless is because we're not really living in a free society...

So, what this pan does is actually very simple; the fins on the sides provide more surface area to catch the heat that slides up the side by convection forces when the pan sits on a gas burner. The "gas burner" part is incredibly important, as if you have an electric burner there will be negligible benefit, and maybe even a negative result. That extra surface area can bleed heat as well as it collects it. And since the pans are cast aluminum, if you have an induction cooktop they won't work at all.

So, let's say you have a gas burner, and one of these pans. Here's what I see as a potential issue. The walls of this pan will get hotter than they do when you use another more traditional type of pan. And that's not necessarily a problem, as long as you keep stirring. But that extra heat will tend to cause liquid at the edge/top of the contents of the pan (the meniscus) to heat far more aggressively. Which means that you will likely get a degree of crusting, scorching, etc...depending on what's in the pan, of course. Water? No problem, it's water. But if you're cooking a sauce, or making something like boxed risotto (not the real hardcore risotto, which requires constant stirring and so would not scorch) or some other grain, you may have some issues. They have a stockpot, which at first would seem like the ideal situation...except that if you're doing most things you would do with a classical stockpot (like making a large batch of stock or soup or stew) you may have MAJOR issues with that scorching.

I have to say...I have a gas cooktop, I cook a lot, I cook elaborately, we have a gas dryer, we have gas-fired heat in the winter. It's a decent-sized single family home. And my gas bill doesn't get high at all...average is a bit less than $50/month. I find it hard to imagine that these pots would make much of a difference in my gas consumption at all. Maybe if my cooktop were really wimpy, the speed of cooking would be nice...but isn't the better option just to get a better cooktop in that case? These pans don't help if you're using a skillet, or the oven (which would also probably be weak if the top burners of the stove are weak), and they cost quite a lot. It'd be cheaper to just upgrade the cooktop than replace all of your pans with this, and the results will be more controllable. I'd love a big pot to boil water for pasta that worked like this...but for every other application it seems to me that upgrading the range would be a better way to go.

But hey, that's just my two cents.

Actually, it's vastly more common to use a helicopter, though that is going to change soon...but in favor of much bigger drones than are used by realtors. My significant other is a producer of documentary content (which uses tons of aerial shots) and they follow a much more stringent process than any realtor does. There's insurance, for one thing, for every aerial shooting session. Insurance for liability, insurance for the aircraft, insurance for the camera (aircraft and camera almost never go together...which is one level of complexity and uncertainty that would go bye-bye with a drone...but at the cost of a certain degree of flexibility as well; you can't specify that a drone will carry a Red, for example) insurance for the pilot, insurance for the cameraman. There are permits that are filed as well, and these vary enormously by jurisdiction. But it's a huge task just to put the shoot together; they don't just drive up with some kind of aircraft and start flying around.

It seems to me that "Safe" requires "Consistent." Otherwise, it's just "theoretically safe," not actually safe. And having just been through a house-buying process, I gotta tell you...I wouldn't entrust all the realtors with the safety of airspace. Especially since they seem to have no real guidance given to them on what "safe" commercial use of a drone actually entails.

The way the Israelis learned to deal with this is very simple. You have a population coming through a checkpoint...almost always, in the case of Israel, a checkpoint between Israel proper and one of the Occupied Territories (Gaza, West Bank). The people coming through are, overwhelmingly, the population from where the risk comes...Palestinians. The cordon is designed so that a suicide bomber will not 1, be able to blow a hole through the barrier that the checkpoint acts as a valve for, and 2, be able to kill the people manning the checkpoint. That leaves only the Palestinians as potential victims...with the deterrent effect that results. Hamas doesn't win bonus points for blowing up their own people.

First off, you can't mirror everything. Lots of infrastructure and applications are either prohibitively expensive to do in a High Availability (HA) configuration or don't support one. Go around a data center and look at all the Oracle database instances that are single-instance...that's because Oracle rapes you on licensing, and sometimes it's not worth the cost to have a failover just to reach a shorter RTO target that isn't needed by the business in the first place. As for load balancing, it normally doesn't do what you think it does...with virtual machine farms, sure, you can have N+X configurations and take machines offline for maintenance. But for most load balancing, the machines operate as a single entity...maintenance on one requires taking them all down because that's how the balancing logic works and/or because load has grown to require all of the systems online to prevent an outage. So HA is the only thing that actually supports the kind of maintenance activity you propose.

Second, doing this adds a lot of work. Failing from primary to secondary on a high availability system is simple for some things (especially embedded devices like firewalls, switches and routers) but very complicated for others. It's cheaper and more effective to bump the pay rate a bit and do what everyone does, for good reason...hold maintenance windows in the middle of the night.

Third, guess what happens when you spend the excess money to make everything HA, go through all the trouble of doing failovers as part of your maintenance...and then something goes wrong during that maintenance? You've just gone from HA to single-instance, during business hours. And if that application or device is one that warrants being in a HA configuration in the first place, you're now in a bit of danger. Roll the dice like that one too many times, and someday there will be an outage...of that application/device, followed immediately after by an outage of your job. It does happen, it has happen, I've seen it happen, and nobody experienced who runs a data center will let it happen to them.

Issue #1: Wikipedia is actually in crisis at the moment, over this very issue. So...hm. We'll see if they actually do survive it.

Issue #2: With Google Maps, there's the larger population that has a very small incentive to edit everything, and although they have a greater incentive to offset information that's false...those incidences are like needles in a haystack, and it's very very hard to find out which ones they are. There will be enormous duplication of effort as well, since the best-patronized businesses will invariably be monitored by many people while others will go ignored due to smaller constituent populations or populations that tend to be less tech-savvy. Conversely, the attacker needs to do very little to do their damage, and requires a far lower degree of vigilance to be successful at it. So, the "sufficiently large population" of "interested people" is extremely hard to accomplish, and even harder to use efficiently.

I'm missing the part where something in Dubai is waiting to be a dystopia...

This is like saying "Hey, he ran a mile nonstop. Don't think he's unhealthy, just because he has full-blown AIDS..." Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

Ah, excellent points. If only we'd have had these planes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd have...oh, wait a minute. NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED.

Our weak points do not hinge on air superiority. The current aircraft with our current pilots are demonstrably far and above better than anyone else on the planet. Yes, we do need to plan ahead...but is a radical new level of sophistication important and/or useful? Consider that no other nation on the planet retains even the ability to project power over distance from their home country, absent an ally where they can stage aircraft. The Russians have one aircraft carrier (the Kuznetsov) which is a steaming pile of shit that's only ever been out 4 times, and never far from home. It lacks catapults, so as a result aircraft that fly from it must go light on both munitions and fuel. It suffers from massive problems with its power plant, and is unreliable. The Chinese have a carrier too...but no ships to support it. Oh, and it's a carbon copy of the Kuznetsov and heads have rolled among the people who managed the purchase of it from the Russians. So it's shit too.

Meanwhile, Congress is doing all they can to axe...the A-10. The A-10 Warthog has killed more tanks than any other weapon in our arsenal, not to mention how many soldiers it's saved via close air support missions. It's universally loved among the pilots who fly it and the troops who have been protected by it, it's tried and true, and it's cheap as hell. Simple, rugged, incredibly durable even when shot to bits and indescribably lethal to ground targets, it's a much better indication of the kind of aircraft role that will be central to future conflicts we face.

So yeah...the F-35 has all sorts of whiz-bang cool stuff, stuff that we don't need, while being unreliable, insanely wasteful of money, and the wrong place for our primary focus to go for the future of war.

Because back then, that was a conceptual description that (if it became real) described an entirely custom system that was built from the ground up. These days, there are multiple types of such systems, most of which are built along specific architectural lines using COTS. Just like once upon a time, "car" was a pretty good descriptor because the next level of detail went WAY into the weeds. Now, there are sports cars, SUVs, minivans, coupes, etc.