As someone who lives in a rural area** , I agree (I don't want my house burning down because some dumbass thought it'd be cool to get a GoPro video and block the firefighters), but that's not going to help the poor bastard who is making a retardant run and accidentally comes up on one.

Given the fairly limited range of the radios used to control said drones, why not just arrest and jail the idiot who is operating the drone for hindering active firefighting operations? Even better, fine the dummy for any costs associated with an aborted retardant run (ever price-out jet fuel? charge 'em that for a few aborted runs and I bet that no one else would even want to try.) The authorities usually cordon off a *huge* zone around an active fire (especially areas in its projected path) with mandatory evacuation orders, and further orders to bodily remove anyone dumb enough to be within that zone. They emphatically do not screw around with this... which leads me to wonder who would be dumb enough to risk the ire of authorities and property owners by pulling such a stupid stunt.

** Yes, I know what a defensible zone is and I fully do my best to insure one around the homestead. I also sit down with my wife and audit/arrange things every spring (sometime before fire season) to insure that an evacuation order means that either one of us can grab the important/critical shit (and the dogs), and get out of Dodge within five minutes, maximum. It's a good practice to have if you live in a forested wilderness, truth be told.

Here's a clue - corporations that damned large and powerful have already figured out how to profit from the whole AGW debate no matter which way it ends.

How? Well first off, they know full well that the world's appetite for plastics, kerosene, gasoline, and nearly all of their products will not slacken in the slightest, so they have plenty of time to adapt to any changes that may come. Meanwhile, these same companies are doing what large corporations all around the planet do: they Greenwash the hell out of their image, and pass the costs of doing so onto the consumer. Carbon tax? Hah! They've got that figured out as well, and again, guess who gets to pay for that? (hint: Not Them. It'll be passed on as a cost of doing business.)

To top all that off, you may want to look into who the biggest investors and shareholders in the Green Energy sector actually are... those same petroleum companies are right there, holding stock and encouraging the whole shebang, because they're more than poised to buy up the first one that actually makes enough headway to be a threat (mind you, not to squash the company, but to profit like hell off of it.) I wouldn't be surprised if many of these alternative energy enterprises are owned in whole or in part by a petroleum corporation, with the alt. energy company being a shell or 'independent' division. Again, no conspiracy or tinfoil involved; it's just a bit of pre-positioning for future profits.

You're more than welcome to disagree, but consider that these same corporations are looking decades ahead, and know full well that they have to hedge their bets against diminishing/expensive supply, rising political instabilities (read: Venezuela and the Mideast), and no-longer-rare governmental money-grab attempts. Only a total idiot would run his company any other way.

So tell me - given the fact that the eeevil petroleum corporations are happily and quietly positioned to profit from this thing no matter which way it goes, why do you think they would bother?

Gotta agree - a link to the actual site that, you know, *sells* the damned things would be nice...

I'm currently sitting very near to several. They're not shrinking violets or failures, though.

BTW - I'd still love to see that evidence.

...what sibling said: Horseshit.

Seriously - I've put up with that same damned condescension and arrogance from faculty and developers alike (e.g. how *dare* some grunt EE with a backwoods Arkansas-flavored accent lecture me about mistakes in my design!), peer pressure, etc.

Here's a clue - *everybody* gets to put up with those obstacles; the difference between success and failure lies in how well you not only fight back, but transcend them.

And what do you mean by "limited job prospects"? I don't know where you live, but skill in certain languages will get you feted and chased after by recruiters out on the West Coast no matter how your biology is plumbed. Same if you're DevOps or a DBA...

But, I guessing that as a guy, you're just guessing (or worse, relaying what you were told by people with agenda afoot). Seriously - Show us verifiable evidence of this discrimination (and I mean factual, verifiable evidence, not some SJW's unverifiable sob story) - I actually want to see some.

...mostly because IT doesn't require a whole lot of physical labor and/or physical agility? Sure, you might have to pick up an odd server or router chassis here and there, but even that's only work for the sysadmin server monkeys, not the code monkeys.

Cheap coders... duh. ;)

Way to miss the point, big guy

GP was saying that even when picked on mercilessly in social situations, boys will tend to not only stick with their geek-like hobbies, but use them as a shelter of sorts from the outside world... so long as it still interests them to do so.

Someone once mentioned that about forming a Caucasian College Fund, just to see what the SJW crowd would do about it.

However, unlike the proven and historical discrimination against folks based on melanin content, I have yet to see or hear of anyone who was actively turned away from a CompSci class (let alone a whole university) based on having two X chromosomes.

Come to think of it, a huge chunk of CompSci's earliest pioneers were (drum roll please...) women. In fact, here's a fun tidbit: The very first modern female CompSci academic got her PhD in 1965 - right at the very dawn of the field ( and get this - she was a Catholic nun.)

TL;DR - this alleged 'bias' against females in CompSci is a tissue of lies at best, and history proves it.

You haven't figured it out yet, have you? This has nothing to do with equality, period.

Even worse - no more C-based fat client from which to avoid using Flash.

Protocol spoofing, VPNs... yeah, good luck with that.

Err, waitaminute... assuming you're not talking about Cisco IOS, there is no such thing as an "iOS" box from Apple. There is an iOS emulation environment within OSX (comes with XTools), but that's a totally different thing.

Second, the number of iOS devices out there number in the hundreds of millions - iPhones, iPads, now the iWatch thingy... so, well, what do you mean "a lot less"?

Also consider that any development box, of any OS brand or type, is going to need periodic cleanups, because the typical developer is banging out code in the thing. This is (depending on the languages used) oftentimes a very messy process, mostly due to the shit-ton of custom/devel libraries, packages, builds that fail spectacularly, and a whole host of other elements that introduce instability.

That's the thing... I don't even have to do/use that. No need for CCleaner or any such utility. Sure, OSX has OS-level utilities (see also the old Onyx utility), but nearly all of them are either for performance-tweaking or Hackintoshing, not day-to-day cleanup/maintenance.

Exactly.

Unlike Windows, the *nix-like nature of OSX keeps it pretty damned clean. Aside from the rare "Repair Permissions" run in Disk Utility to fix something that opens funny, you shouldn't have to do anything on a Mac for OS maintenance. Hell, I had a dual G5 PowerMac that ran 10.3 for years on end w/o any kind of OS-level maintenance, yet it never slowed down.

Stupid Registry BS...