Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

Perhaps "filled with drones" is not exactly accurate, but nowadays almost anything interesting you go to, you are almost sure to see at least one drone.

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

who needs more than...

Very funny Mr Gates.

I'll just chime in with a real response though: 4K video from home movies.

Not everything is going to go into the cloud.

Just my own personal photos require nearly 8TB now between RAW files and converted images.

I think the biggest indictment of them is the fact even my highly pro environmental friends refuse to vote for them as they see them as only a destructive force towards environmental sustainability and see either coalition or labor as a better choice for the environment.

I'd love to hear the rationale behind their thinking.

Because I'm at a loss how two parties promoting growth at all costs, overconsumption, exploitation of the environment (stripe-mining Coal, CSG, dumping of spoil on the reef, etc) could possibly lead to a "better choice for the environment".

I think you are thinking of the greens from more than a decade ago. The Greens haven't stood for that for a long time. They are basically part of labor and push for policies for short term rather than taking consideration of the long term effects or goals.

Here is the Greens policy platform.

Tell us about which parts bother you.

The greens having power would probably do more damage to human decency and DEFINITELY more damage to the environment and the prospects of a sustainable future (if you destroy business you can't head to sustainability, you head towards being a 3rd world country or Greece).

Yes, obviously they'd do far more damage than the "growth at all costs", "destroy the middle classes" pro-oligopoly parties.

The real-world equivalent of this would be a little drone following you around recording where you went, who you talked to, where you went shopping, when you did it, etc, etc.

I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Would you ?

They are all pretty much scumbags. Not even most environmentalists vote for the greens anymore as they are little more than an extension of the labor party, focused on short term thinking and power plays.

Greens an extension of Labor ? Now there's a chuckle.

Sounds like you get most of your political information from your local Rupertarian.

I'm sure a few hardcore greenies have abandoned the Greens as they slowly morph into a generalist centre-left social-democracy party, but their share of the primary vote has remained pretty constant for a decade or more.

Because most of the airports I know about are on the surface of the earth somewhere. Some are even in mountainous areas.

What is the difference between a pilot who flies an aircraft into the ground by hand and one who has programmed the autopilot to do so? The passengers are just as dead, the only difference is that the pilot can catch up on his reading while letting George do the dirty work.

Now, if you're asking why airplanes don't have safety systems that don't allow a pilot to try landing anywhere but at an airport, and in a manner that would assure a survivable landing, then I'd point you at the Gimli Glider, US Airways Flight 1549, and Asiana Flight 214. The first two are examples of off-airport landings that saved the lives of a very large number of people. The latter is an example of the failures that can happen with even just small deviation from the correct approach.

If you allow an override for that safety system so that the first two landings could be made safely, then what stops the pilot from simply activating the override when he flies into the ground deliberately? And given the relatively large number of ways a pilot can turn off the burners (shut off the engines or reduce them to minimal thrust) exactly what would a safety system that prevents off-airport landings do to keep the airplane in the sky? Toss about a handful of pixie dust?

9/11 was an 18-person suicide pact that many would say was based on a secret cult.

The "1 in a million" squared probability someone else calculated is based on two people with independent chances of 1 in a million. When both people are members of the same "cult" with the same goal and both have worked to get themselves into the position where they can act, the probabilities are no longer independent and can't just be multiplied.

But the chance that a suicidal narcissist who has been able to avoid detection would be able to charm an unsuspecting accomplice into assisting him is much higher than two independently acting secretly suicidal narcissists being in the same place at the same time. These charming, powerful people work with the same flight crews on a regular basis and spend many hours of layover time with each other.

In the US there is no true doctor-patient confidentiality when it comes to pilots. The medical certificate application requires a pilot to list all visits to a doctor in the last three years and the reason (item 19). Item 18 asks if you have ever in your life been diagnosed as having a plethora of conditions, including "(m) mental disorders of any sort; depression, anxiety, etc."

Further, FAR 67.413 says:

(a) Whenever the Administrator finds that additional medical information or history is necessary to determine whether an applicant for or the holder of a medical certificate meets the medical standards for it, the Administrator requests that person to furnish that information or to authorize any clinic, hospital, physician, or other person to release to the Administrator all available information or records concerning that history.

In other words, if you want to be a pilot* in the US, the federal government can ask you to provide access to any and all medical records there might be on you. If you say "no", they can yank your medical certificate. That means you don't get to be a pilot anymore -- not even as a sport pilot that doesn't normally need a medical certificate. It doesn't matter that the guy you share ownership of a sport aircraft with has never tried to get a medical certificate, if YOU had one and it was yanked you don't get to fly that aircraft as PIC legally, even though he can.

And making false statements on the medical application can also result in revocation of the medical. Simply failing to check the box for "depression" when you have been diagnosed and have not previously reported it is considered making a false statement.

* at any level higher than "sport".

No airline takeover/sabotage attempt that passengers could reach has succeeded since 911 (the most recent just a week or two ago when some idiot ran down the isles towards the cockpit door screaming - was tackled and pressed).

Stop locking the door altogether. If there's a problem, you'll have a line of people waiting to destroy whoever tries to take over a cockpit now. Threaten to hurt someone with a box cutter? Whatever damage you can do to one person is outweighed by every other person on that plane wanting to live.

Locking the cockpit doors has, to date, only brought disaster. You have to think that had the airplane that vanished had open cockpit access passengers could have got in there over the many hours the thing was off course (there are a lot of people that monitor aircraft position during flight).

No, I think the ISP's will only keep it for two years - but that is gauranteed.

Right now in the U.S. everyone blindly assumes the data is kept for NO years, and we aren't even given an imaginary date when it might be deleted.

The Australians are at least all aware for sure the data is being kept, in the U.S. it's still possible to imagine it is not... That's my point.

" That's 15 million years to brute force, on average; what duration are you looking for?"

My 15-character password would take 157 billion years to crack.

Your 15 million years is a laugh.