IIRC, the police responding to the incident obligingly gave the damaged drone back to its owner, rather than confiscating it as evidence. So if the shooter is lying and the drone was high up, then that video should come out eventually to corroborate the operator; on the other hand, if the operator is lying and the drone was much lower, then the police have allowed the operator to erase that video and we'll never see it.

Well, in the spirit of the incessant "I think I type faster with swype so your physical keyboard preference is invalid", let me just say that "I've never had a keyboard phone fail so your experience with your hardware is invalid."

;)

I am also firmly in the physical keyboard camp, and I constantly hear that argument that screens are so big now, to which I always reply: that's exactly the point. The screen is nice and big and beautiful, and I would like to use it to display *content*, not interface. When more than half the screen is wasted on drawing 26 letters and other assorted UI, then suddenly the amount of screen that can actually be used to compose your message, and display the context of that message, is tiny.

A physical slide-out keyboard allows me to use the entire screen for its actual ideal purpose: displaying things that change. A mostly static keyboard interface is a poor use of that space, and I absolutely do not mind the extra weight and bulk of the keyboard, because when composing long messages or working in a remote terminal shell it is absolutely worth it to me.

Really? It seems fairly straightforward that many in Congress would love for Obama to finalize this deal in secret, knowing that it will be great for their business constituents and, when the details are finally made public, fairly unpopular with the public. Then they get to have the policy they really want, and still blame Obama for all the parts people don't like, without having to take any responsibility themselves.

Of course they'd want to abdicate their role.

Yeah, saw your reply above. Missed that part. No SpaceX for me, I guess.

The set of points that are exactly one mile north of the south pole? I can see your reasoning except that it's hard to follow step 2 from such a starting point; how is it possible to walk one mile west once you're standing exactly on the pole?

If people honestly consider this "insightful" and not "troll" then we're in worse shape than I realized. Yes, there are rioters, and yes, they should be dealt with according to the law. *Nobody* is saying that arsonists, looters or vandals should be given a pass.

But let's not forget that despite what the evening news likes to insinuate, those people make up a really tiny percentage of the protesters. Are you honestly willing to throw away the ideals of this country and violate the freedom of thousands of innocent and peaceful people in order to catch a few dozen vandals?

This is a perfect illustration of why the "if you have nothing to hide" argument in favor of government spying is so short-sighted. Yes, they always *say* that they will only use such powers of surveillance against foreign enemies and terrorists and child molesters and so on. But once they have such power, they will *inevitably* start using it against American citizens who are engaged in the Constitutionally protected activity of criticizing their government.

Anyone who has ever argued in favor of government spy powers needs to think long and hard about what kind of country we're becoming as a result of those powers, and whether we really want to be that kind of country.

Of course, fuel efficiency is not the only problem with SUVs. That extra ground clearance makes them awful for road visibility because it's much more difficult to see through or around them from a regular sized vehicle, so every SUV on the road makes driving more dangerous for everyone.

They're also relatively heavy and many of them have bumpers that are too high to align with regular vehicles, so any collision between a regular vehicle and an SUV will tend to be more fatal to the non-SUV driver. So once again, every SUV on the road makes driving more dangerous for everyone.

All in all, every time I see an SUV on the road I have to assume that the driver is a huge jerk, because only a huge jerk would choose to endanger other people's lives just for the sake of their comfort and convenience.

This analysis (by necessity) only included *public* posts to Google+, which makes the conclusion completely meaningless.

You can't just sweep that detail under the rug when comparing Google+ to something like Facebook. One of Google+'s biggest selling points is the ability to actually control exactly who can and cannot see everything you post, so the proportion of posts that are completely wide open to the public is going to be much, much lower than on Facebook.

There's plenty of activity there, this guy just can't see it because it's being shared privately among friends and not with the entire internet. And rightly so.

It is very illegal for a merchant to store your credit card number for more than the 5 seconds it takes to authorize the transaction, unless they implement fairly strong protection to make sure nobody can steal those numbers later. But even if they do this, it is still very illegal for them to try to share those card numbers and what they purchased, which would be necessary for different merchants to "track" your purchases.

CurrentC probably does not have this protection. Merchants would be free to store and share the fact that your CurrentC account number bought X here, Y there, and Z there. Merchants would love that ability, which is why they've designed CurrentC to allow it; as a customer, you have very little to gain from that kind of data mining, and almost definitely plenty to lose.

This is my recommendation also. Never had any issue with their service, billing models are very straightforward, and their philosophy specifically embraces things like parody sites (within the law).

I think this hints at the fundamental disagreement between people's thoughts on "net neutrality."

Some folks think business is business and should be able to do whatever it wants, probably because they have money or some other vested interest in the current telecommunications behemoths, so they want the maximum return on that investment no matter who gets screwed in the process.

Other folks (like you) see a problem with the current arrangement, and believe that the solution is to create more competition so that the telecom industry "regulates itself." In principle I agree, but I think that's just not possible in this case.

The rest of us believe that telecom is, was, and (for the foreseeable future) always will be a *natural* monopoly. You can't have meaningful competition for building roads and sewers and power grids, in part because those things cost so much money that it is effectively impossible for a new player to enter the market, and in part because our cities would be a mess if we had to deal with multiple parallel networks of these kinds of infrastructural utilities. Telecom has exactly the same issues; no matter how data transmission technology evolves (in the foreseeable future), be it telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber optics, or whatever is next, it will always be vastly more efficient for a single entity to install and manage that physical data network, at least at the local level. There just can not be meaningful local competition in data transmission services (which includes telephone, television, internet, etc). So the solution for telecom is exactly the same as it is for water, sewer, roads, etc: allow one entity to run it, but regulate them heavily as a public utility.

The problem we're facing now is "how to get there from here." We should have made this transition decades ago, but for a variety of reasons didn't, and so now those telecom monopolies have been allowed to remain private for too long and grow to enormous size. Wrangling them back into a public utility arrangement is the only sustainable path forward, but it will also be extremely politically difficult.

Just to play devil's advocate here for a moment:

This guy knew he had been in the hot zone and may have been exposed, and was trying to get back to the US. So his options were

• a) be honest about his exposure and almost certainly be denied re-entry; or
• b) lie about exposure in order to get back into the US.

Now, if he had not actually contracted ebola, he was likely to live in either case, (a) just would have been more inconvenient. But if (as was the case) he really did have ebola, then he would have seen (a) as suicide, and (b) as a small but measurable chance to live, given the quality of health care facilities in the US.

So, he had quite an incentive to lie about his exposure, didn't he? I'm clearly not condoning it, but... that's quite a catch, that catch-22.

That sounds a little like submarine combat, as opposed to the surface naval or air combat that currently inspires our space battle sci-fi.