Feinstein again, that woman needs to be banned from government by a constitutional amendment. She is the epitome of what is wrong with current politics, she's a hypocrite, she'll jump on any bandwagon that gets her press, she has the common sense of an unsupervised teenager with a platinum credit card in a mall and she will twist the facts or outright lie to get her way. Oh and she's just plain crazy to boot.

I took a tour to a wind farm as a kind of fact finding when they were trying to put one in my area (eventually killed by NIMBY's, none of which went on any of the offered tours). Sure they make noise but your example is quite accurate, its about as much as wind through trees. Standing with one looming overhead it was barely perceivable with no traffic, no trees in the area and everyone quite from a just finished speech from one of the guides. Even standing right at the base it was less noise then you would have standing by a maple on a mildly windy fall day. We were told that some atmospheric conditions could significantly increase the noise (humidity, low temperatures) but if it can increase turbine noise it probably increases other local noises as well (traffic, trees, etc).

"The vehicles would be restricted"

Yes the vehicles would be restricted by location but the drones would be restricted by payload. A drone may be able to drop a bomb right into an area but it would have to be a very small bomb (equivalent to a couple hand grenades) and would be very obvious doing it. A car/truck/van can be loaded with a several hundred pound bomb on a timer and doesn't have to get close to its target to wreak mass casualties and probably isn't going to raise a single eyebrow until it explodes. A single minivan rigged with gasoline and explosives parked at a marathon or festival would kill far more than a dozen drones dropping bombs on a sports stadium.

Most current small drones operate by uninterrupted remote control, I would assume package delivery over a wide area would make that impractical. These things would probably operate via self navigation (combination of gps, inertial, camera, transponder), if that is the case you could limit their inputs (land now, return to base, come to nearby truck with big Amazon logo, etc) and input their flight profile by physical connector, limiting the ability of hackers to commandeer the craft. Even then some are still going to be stolen/destroyed but losses via accident or malice are a part of any commercial venture anyway.

As long as the package/drone size is kept small and there are appropriate safety precautions taken it should be as safe if not safer than current delivery methods. Simply designate a operating zone for them (say 300-400' AMSL), allowable weather conditions, require any operator (or group of operators) map all "no go" zones (airports, substations, wind turbines, etc) in the drones operating area before the first drone leaves the ground, require all of them to have a interoperable transponder broadcasting location, speed & direction, etc, and make the company who sends out the drone responsible for any issues it may cause (via some kind of insurance probably). Sure once in a while one of them will malfunction, but so do normal delivery trucks. Just Google Image "ups truck crash" and you'll see some very poignant examples.

Most of those occurrences were during a time of war, a war that eventually ended. What we have today with the advent of the "war on terrorism" and the now fading "war on drugs" is a state of perpetual "war" because they are such an abstract concept. They also tended to target a very small portion of the population (Japanese, communists, anarchists, etc) whereas today the government targets large swaths of the population, the only thing keeping the system in check is limits on prosecutor & correction facility resources. One of the few pluses to the economic downturn is it finally put a dent in those resources, up until 2008 the inmate population was increasing at the same obscene rate it had since the 70's/80's. After that it "miraculous" began declining.

And how do we know the officers smelled anything? A five minute internet search can come up with case after case where officers claimed one thing (including writing it up in police reports, testifying in court, etc) and later video evidence proved they were telling bold faced lies (Hollywood Florida Framing, BART shooting, OWS protests, Michael Dehererra Beating, Rodney King, Danziger Bridge shootings, etc), oh I'm sorry they "misremembered" the incident. When an independent lab confirms traces of drugs I'll believe it, Until then I personally don't consider an officers statements to carry any more weight than the suspects.

Propaganda can absolutely be lies, it just doesn't have to be. Take the Iraq war, we were told it was necessary to keep WMD's out if Saddams hands and prevent support of terrorism. Years of searching & investigations after we invaded it was proven beyond all doubt that the WMD claims were completely unfounded and the Iraqis had gone out of their way to get rid of the chemical & biological weapons. In addition no concrete terrorist ties were found pre-invasion, in fact it is widely believed that the Iraq invasion became a 'cause celebre' event amongst extremest groups actually resulting in a worldwide increase in terrorist groups/ideology.

Sorry to break it to you but that "statistic" is a bunch of BS. Everyone in the US pays taxes of some sort. I'm not particularly high on the tax scale (about $36k a year) and I estimate that i pay at least 30% of my income in local, state, federal and specific taxes (sales, gas, property, vehicle, etc). MAYBE some very poor (or very rich) people can avoid some of those taxes but EVERYONE pays at least a few of them.

I'm all for blocking obvious CP search terms, but 10,000? How many of those terms could also be for perfectly legitimate purposes? I know one time I was trying to look a certain kind of bridge type for something (biglegs? thicklegs? something like that) on one of the image search sites and I got a bunch of rear shots of scantly clad women. Anyone with a basic understanding of the English language knows that many words have two meanings, throw in abbreviations & slang and they can have 10, throw in various phrases and your hitting the hundreds.

Thats splitting the hair mighty thin, a couple year difference that occurred almost 200 years ago. Especially when there seemed to be absolutely no interest in the islands until the Europeans began colonizing them.

"But still, Argentina has the right to ask to have them back."

Besides being close geographically what claim does Argentina have to the Falklands? At least from what I can find the only time that its population was primarily Argentinian was back around 1774-1811 when the British and Spanish (originally French) settlements were temporarily abandoned (fear of war?) until roughly the 1840s when the British settlements were reestablished. Before the Europeans colonized the islands there may have been some prehistoric settlements and a very short lived occupation by the a Buenos Aires garrison back in 1832 that ended in mutiny but not much else.

"That said, the land should belong to Argentina."

If it was an occupation I would agree wholeheartedly. However if what I am reading is correct the people (mostly of European decent) currently living there have been doing so for around 200 years. Even the first known settlement, around 323 years ago, was of English origin. A referendum held in march of this year had a 99.8% vote to remain a colony of the UK. People should have the ability to associate with others based on their own determination, not geographic location.

Someone was way off, I thought I read something this morning putting its demise somewhere around Siberia/Alaska? I'm also surprised anyone saw it, the Falkland Islands aren't exactly populated. I think its somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 people, the average 36 square mile county has that around me and the Falkland Islands are over 4,700 square miles.

True, I suppose there are other considerations that should be noted as well. Back during that big power outage a few years back we still had a basement wood stove, even without power it kept the house decent while other people were scrambling for kerosene heaters to stay above freezing. Our new setup (external wood boiler hooked to central heating system) cannot heat the home without power, we do have a generator that could be rigged to run the system but if it wasn't working we would be SOL.