During the runup to the second Gulf War there was a story circulating about how The Empire was really the good guys and the Rebel Alliance was just a bunch of terrorists. The sad part was, in the logic of the time it was being sold by many as a serious argument. Not even a joke. Here's a link to it from 2002 in The Weekly Standard

So yeah, this has already happened.

And of course: "Doctors are baffled," which is even true in this case.

As another poster pointed out, it's just posturing for anyone to say they are going to shoot down the drones.

Not from the ground. From another drone. Don't even need to shoot, just get above it and drop something sufficiently nasty on its rotors. Collect the wreckage and sell what's salvageable...maybe even in your Amazon store.

I have one that can carry 2kg...

They're talking 25 kg / 55lbs pound load here, so you're off by more than an order of magnitude.

It's like Rincewind said: "I like boring. It lasts."

> BTW, the deficit reductions under Clinton were the direct result of the policies of Reagan and Gingrich.

Bullshit. The Clinton surplus was created by the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which every single Republican in congress voted against.

A lot of other state have that in law have in *addition* ban on discrimination. Example : illinois they do indeed have a freedom fo religion act, but at the same time they have a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. And as far as i can tell, when both conflict, the ban would take precedence.

The problem is where do you draw the line?

Why is there a line to be drawn?

Photographer refuses to take photographs at a non-white wedding because of "religious" beliefs. Will take photos of any white ceremony.

And? Can the couple still get married? Can they find a photographer? Pretty sure they can. The photographer's bigotry does not pick anyone's pocket or break anyone's leg. It does not interfere with anyone's rights. Let him turn down paying customers and give opportunity to his competition, it's sort of a self-limiting problem.There is no need for any action here, any more than if a Catholic music composer accepts a commission from the diocese but doesn't accept a commission from the local synagogue (or from the Westborough Baptist Church).

Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that all things except what the state have decided are proper should be forbidden.

Yes, among enlightened people race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation should not matter. That does not imply that unenlightened people should be subject to criminal prosecution or lawsuits.

You should be permitted to discriminate in some areas because you should be permitted to do anything you want that does not interfere with the fundamental rights of others. Housing is a fundamental right, so you shouldn't be legally able to discriminate in renting out a house. But hiring a specific person to take your wedding pictures is not a fundamental right, so a photographer should be legally able to turn down a paying customer for whatever reason they want, even bigotry.

NASA, JAXA and similar outfit drool at the perspective to have a long term project where they need to send a lot of cargo up, means a lot of contract and assured budget.

Those folk tells the space solar collector are possible and desirable.
 
The folk at energy production on the other hand use a calculator for cost of setting up, maintaining compared to generated energy and they usually view that as possible but not profitable compared to a similarly sized (in megawatt) installation on earth with physical batteries.

Sorry I i trust far more than who are involved i energy generation, than those involved into profiting by cargoeing the stuff.

It happened in one meeting, chaired by Theodoric of Ft. Meade, NSA Subdirector. Here's a transcript Snowden smuggled out:

Doing the math with the wrong numbers isn't informative. You've ignored the atmospheric losses suffered by ground-based systems -- clouds, dust, the opacity of air. I think you're also being much more generous in estimating the potential lifetime of ground-based systems than space-based ones, which skews your numbers.

It may be that the gains are small enough to not justify the launch costs, though that depends on how much we value land taken up by solar arrays.

Reading the reactions I find it amazing how many climate experts there are on slashdot.

Future efforts are likely to concentrate on the ppc64le architecture variant, which is little endian. There are still some differences to x86_64 at the C level (chars are unsigned by default, but you can compile with -fsigned-char), but it is reportedly not too difficult to port over C/C++ application code.