The trouble with drones is that most of them don't have enough sensing to avoid other aircraft. Most don't have aviation transponders. Yet some of them are big enough that they're a hazard to other aircraft. Many of them can get 500 feet above ground level (AGL).

Many model aircraft can get above 500ft AGL. It's not a real problem getting them up there, it's a problem controlling them once they're up there if you're watching from the ground. Thus, "first person view" drones.

The Academy of Model Aeronautics used to have a 450' AGL rule, and the FAA has a clear rule about doing anything off the ground within 5 miles of an airport without coordination with the tower. That's enough to keep the little guys from interfering with aircraft.

The AMA is a bunch of irrelevant old retired guys; their main thrust is to convince municipalities it is too dangerous to allow anyone to fly model aircraft unless they have the AMA seal of approval, which they'll grant you (for a fee) if you're an old retired guy willing to fly your plane in a predefined pattern all day. They hate First Person View because they think it violates the purity of the hobby or something, and a lot of them object to anything that's not fixed-wing.

I suspect most people flying model aircraft in the US haven't heard of them; certainly few enough are members.

The FAA has lost the only court case on this matter they've fought.

It's worse than that. Not only did they lose the case, they lost it in their own administrative courts. But of course they can force everyone else go to through the exact same long and expensive process because there's no cost to them for doing so.

If instead of fucking around with putting MLK in jail for 30-60 days at a time, they've managed to get the laws changed so that organizing a sit-in was a felony, they could have kept him locked up, incommunicado or nearly so, for years and kept him on a tight leash (as a convicted felon) even if he got out.

The scarier people could either have gotten the message or been shot while resisting arrest.

We've got the necessary laws, 100 times over, by now. The protests that happen are ineffective because anything that threatens to become effective will be destroyed in no time.

If you expect them to keep servicing it then of course you should pay, and if you don't understand why then I'm assuming you have never been tasked with maintaining an active source tree in a commercial setting.

Precisely. No matter what alternative energy you come up with, as soon as it threatens to become practical to use it at scale, the environmentalists will find a problem with it and shut it down. Fuck em, just burn lignite.

Temperature goes up more or less linearly, and CO2 goes up more or less linearly. Thus they are well-correlated. There's not a lot of power to that correlation, as the article demonstrates itself by trying it with different lags (from 0 to 20 years -- would have been interesting if he'd tried negative lags); the data is too featureless to show anything interesting.

Yes, it's one of the most common memory handling bugs and is known as a buffer overflow, generally buffer overflows are difficult to exploit which can be seen in the fact that nobody has actually demonstrated extracting a key using this particular bug, just that it is "possible" to do so. Winning the lottery is also "possible".

There's all sorts of complete bullshit about this bug in the press, to paraphrase what I read today in the WSJ that "It turns out that just 4 European developers and some guy in the US are responsible for the code that secures the internet", utter drivel!

There's almost certainly more than one layer of security for anything juicy, for example, the delay enforced on posts from the same Slashdot account makes it difficult (but not impossible) to spam Slashdot comments.

Ten seconds on Google would have saved you from making a fool of yourself.

That's why software developers shouldn't insist on using the title Engineer. This kind of accountability is expected of an engineer, it's not an anomaly.

Engineers just build siege engines, they're not responsible if the siege fails.

Funny you should say that, the diplomatic cable leaks showed that high level western diplomats in Syria were concerned about a civil war erupting due to the severe "fertile crescent" drought fuelling internal migration from rural areas to the cities (10% of Syria's total population simply abandoned their farms due to lack of water). The drought caused food prices to rise sharply and food riots became a regular occurrence in cities across the middle east and North Africa.

"flash point" - Have a look at why that protester set fire to himself in the public square and why it resonated so strongly across the Arab world, it wasn't because they all logged on to FB and suddenly realised their governments were tyrannical. Predicting this sort of social unrest is like predicting an earthquake in LA, you can be pretty confident that your prediction will come to pass but have no idea when.

Making mid-production changes in parts without changing the part number -- at least the customer-visible part number -- is not unheard-of, it's common.