Clearly, we need a major war which absolutely requires that every soldier be equipped with a personal jetpack.

Often illegal, yes. Firing birdshot into the air is not dangerous. That's why we use shotguns and birdshot to shoot birds. From the air. Birdshot's terminal velocity is low enough that by the time the shot falls to the ground it's not dangerous.

Texas is the only state that allows deadly force to be used in defense of property. This is a case where Texas is wrong and the rest of the country is right. I'm all for the right to keep and bear arms, I carry daily and am a certified concealed weapons instructor. But deadly force should only be used to defend people, not stuff.

This.

Further, even after you've unloaded it you should still obey the golden rule of gun safety: never point it at anything you don't want to destroy. If what you're doing requires breaking that rule, first disassemble it so it's no longer a gun. Then, and only then, can you stop worrying about where you're pointing it.

The reason for this is that most people who hurt themselves or others while cleaning their gun *did* unload it first. Or thought they did.

I don't see a single one of these that the pilot definitively violated. "Don't fly near people or stadiums" is the only thing he might have violated, depending on where in this guy's yard it was. (I don't consider shotgun range to be "near enough to be dangerous" - well for danger to people from the aircraft. Obviously the shotgun is dangerous).

What if he was taking pictures of the neighbor's house, at the request of the neighbor? (In fact this is what he claims he was doing.)

To play devil's advocate:

The drone pilot claims he was asked by one of the people in the neighborhood to take some pictures. I've done this before.

In the case of the guy with the shotgun - can he confirm that the camera was indeed pointed towards him, as opposed to someone else's house (that someone else who could have given permission and possibly even requested the photography)? Same for the 16 year old who waved at it - did she know for sure that she was seen on camera, or was the camera aimed elsewhere and it's just coincidence the pilot moved the thing for a different camera angle after a bit?

That said, if you're trying to take pictures of friend A's house, and want to get an oblique (from the side view) shot which requires you to be over the neighbor's property but with the camera aimed at A's property - you should probably chat with A's neighbors just to give them a heads up what you're doing.

Have you ever heard of air resistance and terminal velocity?

It's never been reliable. NT4SP1 was murderous. You have to wait to find out if service packs will break things, too. Or, you know, test. That's what a responsible corporate environment looks like. At home, you wait, or you live dangerously.

High-gain directional antenna what what? They've got hills in Texas, too, little-known fact.

I think two cores is enough for most purposes, but since the Xbox 360 you really want at least four cores for PC gaming. My last machine originally had three cores (Phenom II X3 720) and later sprouted three more (Phenom II X6 1045T) and is now my dedicated Linux desktop system. It, too, has 8GB. Now that game consoles have eight cores, it is in theory a good idea to have eight cores. In practice, the new i5 is faster at running eight threads than my FX-8350, even though it only has four cores. I would have had to have purchased a more expensive motherboard to go with my more expensive processor, though. I do have to admit that the intel benchmarks tend to produce much better minimum frame rates than the AMD boards, though. It might be worth the money.

I would use the in-place upgrade, but only out of curiosity. I'd like to see if Microsoft has it any better figured out than before. But then I would go ahead and nuke it and do a fresh install anyway.

Thinking is what you aren't doing. Installing Windows 10 on your Windows 7 machine, assuming you are getting Windows 10 for free because you have a Windows 7 license, invalidates your Windows 7 license. Or as the saying goes, "You can't go home again."

Granted, I can dick around with activation hacks and keep running 7 in perpetuity, at least in theory. But I paid for Windows specifically so I wouldn't have to mess with any of that crap, and so that I could get Windows 10 for the same low, low price.

Don't forget to leave a comment worth reading, man

Oh, yes you can. You can buy enterprise-class processors and have assloads of cores. And my cores came from AMD, you could get cores from intel. Of course, you would have to spend vastly more money, which is why I didn't do that. I bought as much machine as I could get for just a few hundred bucks. The MB and case are refurbs, the video card is just a 750 Ti (Might upgrade pretty soon though, nvidia is getting ready to drop another budget board) and the processor is the middle-of-the-road version.

Mostly you could have a faster processor, in the real world even the new i5 is faster than this 8350. And of course, you could have vastly more GPU. Mine was just around a hundred, you can spend as much as I spent on my whole system on graphics. Or, as I considered briefly, you could have a couple of processors, each with more cores. But I decided that 8 was enough, even if I virtualize a couple of dual-core machines I still have enough left to get by and if I want to feed more VMs than that, I need to spend a lot more on storage.

Well, I do think I left in some weasel words about how they could screw it up, and how it might be some successor which would dominate on the same basis. But yeah, I bet on Ouya, and I was wrong. It does happen.

Yep.

You, sir, are a hypocrite. Re-read this thread if you don't understand why. Now good day.