This /is/ possible. For example on the US-Mexican border, people often don't know they carry drugs. They pass the border regularly by car, and on one side their bag gets replaced (break into their car, whatever) with a same-looking second one, having special content. On the other side, the same exchange happens just reverse. They don't even realize they have carried drugs, and when the police officers find the drugs, the innocent gets blamed.

A similar thing has been known to happen with airline passengers' luggage. The criminal gangs involved are probably delighted with "TSA approved" locks.

I'm betting most explosives, being highly combustible, can be set off with a static charge.

There are explosives, such as RDX, which will burn, but require a shockwave to cause them to detonate.

Sounds to me like the police need to seize those ATC recordings as part of their investigation into this incident. When the police have the evidence in their possession about what happened, then they'll let us know what evidence they want to let us see in accordance to what verdict they want the outcome to have.

Presumably soon after doing this NYPD won't be flying anything due to lack of certificates of airwothyness and pilot's licenses.
Even if they do have jurisdiction over FAA recordings the FAA can quite literally "ground" them.
Probably invite the NTSB along too. Given that this incident has now become more serious. Since a mid air collision involving something as large as an NYPD chopper could easily kill everyone aboard both aircraft. (Whereas a drone is the equivalant of a single large bird, potentially expensive but very unlikely to pose any actual danger.)

So when are reckless endangerment charges going to be filed against the pilot? He intentionally steered his craft towards an object that they admit through their own filings presented a risk of a crash.

Was the pilot the only occupant of this aircraft?
Possibly more important what happens to the two men falsely arrested? Are there procedures to "annull" any record of their arrest?

What disturbs me is the apparently lockstep between the UK and the US in the subversion of democracy and installation of fascist totalitarianism.

What I find interesting is that neither UKIP or The BNP have much to say about UK/US relationship. Even though both claim to be "nationalist". Whilst UKIP has plenty to say about "Europe" their silence is deafening with respect to how the UK government interacts with most of the world.

Direct democracy only works with small populations. Especially ones that are mostly ethnically homogenous and don't have much to disagree about.

It dosn't appear to have actually been tried that often. Nor has "classical democracy" for that matter.

OK, to clarify... disappearances and purges are bad news, but it's not as if these historical dictatorships were all fine and dandy up until the point where people started disappearing.

Historically the majority of the public may see little wrong even when people are disappearing. Many people appear to have a great deal of faith in both politicians and governments. It can be far easier to believe that the disappeared were somehow to blame.

In the US the FBI is recommending that anyone who knows such things as "Encryption" or "VPNs" be turned in to their local police immediately as a terrorist. So, because I am good at my job and understand complex concepts, that means that I am a terrorist? That's funny, it used to be called "American pride".

There's a good chance that actual terrorists will be using some communication method so "low tech" that it would be un-noticed.
Only a terrorist group which is geographically dispersed is going to need "telecommunications" in the first place.
Even then dead drops and codes even broadcasting (e.g. spam) maybe more use to them than any form of cypher.
Maybe there is a super special watch list for anyone who has ever read http://www.amazon.com/Codes-Se...

Probably the future of wearables is the personal hub.

The problem with wearables is that a radio capable of sustaining a connection to the outside world - be it 4g or wifi - needs a fair bit of power and consequently quite a lot of battery. So devices have to be fairly chunky, or else have to be recharged more often than you'd like. But your bluetooth mouse probably goes months on one charge - mine certainly does. So the solutions is to have a device mounted discreetly on your belt or in your handbag, or carried in a pocket, which just acts as a personal hub/firewall, doing backhaul for your wearables. It doesn't need a screen. It doesn't need apps. But once it's paired with your wearables, you can use a device which has no backhaul capability to make phone calls or to access any service on the Internet.

This is an extension of how Google Glass or your Pebble watch already uses your smartphone. The smartphone acts as a personal hub. But if the display you actually use is the one on your Glass or the one on your Pebble, you don't need the big, fragile, power-hungry screen on your smartphone any more; so the personal hub can be cheaper and much more durable than any smartphone.

Once you've got that concept, there are other services that a personal hub can supply to your wearables, for example storage.

Everyone knows that the year of wearable computing is the year after the year of Linux on the desktop.....

The only problem with that is I have now had Linux on my desktop for TWENTY-ONE YEARS.

Actually, as a climate skeptic, I've been saying for years that we should all focus on innovative nuclear technologies. Fossil fuels are dirty, finite and expensive. Cheap, safe & clean nuclear energy is something that could benefit everybody, regardless of beliefs. I don't understand why global warming believers aren't pushing super hard for this.

It's even stranger when you consider that whilst nuclear is both "low carbon" and "renewable" much of what is pushed dosn't meet those criteria at all. Indeed plenty of it appears to be worst, including by "warmist" metrics, than doing nothing!

Meanwhile, 80 billion is spent on global warming programs

What effect will this money have on "carbon" emissions anyway?

and fusion programs get their funding cut.

Nobody has yet managed to build a working fusion generating plant. In contrast there are "off the shelf" uranium (or plutonium) fission designs available.

If a climatologist and a mathematician disagree on the math used in a climate paper, who is the expert?

That is very much the crux of the matter.
In order to possibly be meaningful "climate science" must also follow the rules of many other sciences. They form a foundation to it. In the same way that biology must be consistent with both chemistry and physics.

Given that there's remarkably little proof that this is not caused by humans, wouldn't it be better to follow the path that would avoid a catastrophe in the event that the models are close and it is human caused.

Exactly what path is that? There are plenty of ideas which have the potyential to CAUSE a catastrophe. Even ignoring unexpected consequences.
Plenty of supposedly "green" methods of generating electrity turn out to have similar, even larger, "carbon footprints" than burning fossil fuels to boil water. With an existing technology which is "low carbon" dismissed by "envronmentalists".
This sounds like the so called "precautionary principle". Where "precautionary", along with "renewable" and "sustainable" has it's definition twisted in the sorts of strange ways associated with political extremism.

OK, that was funny. But the 97% number is nonsense, just for the record.

Claiming consensus (or near consensus) isn't "science" anyway. It's "politics" or possibly "religion".

Skepticism about AGW catastrophism is rampant among the world's scientists at large (physicists, biologists, etc.)

Since they are not "climate scientists" their opinion dosn't count here. Even if their skepticism were to come from either their own specialty (which would also include chemists, geologists, paleontologists, archeologists, historians, statisticians, computer scientists, etc.) or their understanding of "scientific method.

and many climate scientists have been cautiously coming out of the closet and poking sticks at the shaky foundations as well.

But would any "true climate scientist" not believe in CAGW? Or is there a "No True Scotsman" fallacy at work here?

I'm a little bit surprised that Slashdot doesn't have more AGW catastrophism skeptics, to be honest. Ordinary people hear "supercomputer driven model simulation" and they think "oooh, it must be really accurate and able to predict the future". Anybody who understands statistics and the banal realities of computation knows the good old GIGO principle.

That would still be a case of "not a climate scientist". The concept of "nobody out side of a group can critique a member's actions, but anyone who might do so wouldn't be allowed to be a member in the first place" isn't that uncommon.

Not to mention the reality that nobody has ever successfully predicted long term climate changes

It's even worst than that. Even models which can "hindcast" have been incapable of forcasting. But few, if any, have been "too cool".

Ain't going to happen, sadly. As the temperate zone moves closer to the world's poles, and the regions we're currently growing cereal crops on become progressively more arid, there is simply less area of land (square miles or kilometres or however you want to measure it) on which crops can be grown - and that's ignoring the costs of clearing and draining that land, and all the effects of ecocide.

At the same time as this is happening, of course, all our critical infrastructure will become unusable unless we make huge new investments in flood walls. For example, I work for a major international bank, which, obviously, has its critical data infrastructure replicated in seven cities across the globe. Only one problem: in six of those seven cities, our data centres are within ten metres of current sea level. Most major financial centres are old port cities, and all old port cities are on the coast. So over the next fifty years we have to either all relocate our trading infrastructure, or else abandon it. What I expect will happen is that we'll delay and dawdle until it's too late, and then our whole civilisation will collapse under the combined pressures of hunger, refugees, and rising water levels.

We're already past the point where there's any hope of the planet being able to support even half its current population in 100 years time. The real policy question is how we now radically reduce the population without war, pestilence, famine and death.