There are some ethical concerns once proliferation increases, including accountability and plausible deniability on the part of bad actors (possibly including ourselves). Still, this issue is much more closely related to small arms than WMDs like nukes. One nuke can kill millions and potentially injure millions more. It's difficult to imagine a scenario -- especially one unique to drones -- where the same could be true of one drone carrying conventional weapons. For the most part, I expect that drones will continue to be used mainly in scenarios where a cruise missile or other air strike might have been used in the past. As a species, we've been killing remotely since the first bow was used in combat. So a few thousand years now. Drones are just the latest way to keep far enough away from the enemy that he can't quickly and easily hit back, which is sort of the point of using a weapon.

It's not being abused because a) the bandwidth is so low and the latency is so high that it doesn't work unless you get lucky, and b) most people don't know what you're talking about. Mostly b.

Go ahead. There's a reason the air circulates from ceiling to floor.

Which raises the following important questions: Can cows light their burps on fire, and if so, are dragons basically flying cows?

...is that Norway has an army!

You first.

He is fighting against a lobby that spans centuries

Please round to the nearest whole century = 1.

Sure, the same way your teacher was talking to "everyone" in the class when she said that bullying was not acceptable. Just because she didn't single out the bully doesn't mean she was addressing the rest of the students, per se.

Though to be clear, I think this was more case of "CYA" by the NHTSA than "hey, let's fix our obsolete rating scale."

Instead of using a relative rating scale to encourage new technologies that make vehicles safer, we will establish an arbitrary threshold for perfect safety and enforce it vigorously so that nobody looks bad. -- Automakers via NHTSA, apparently.

Wii is a fantastic platform to develop for. If you're Nintendo.

In other words, perfectly valid. Wait, which one has the 8-track?

Leave binarylarry all one!

I don't draw lines in anticipation of hypothetical situations that will probably never happen; I just make the best decisions I can as choices present themselves based on either the facts as I know them (choosing what job to take), or my gut (choosing what to eat, no pun intended).

Based on the limited facts as you've presented them, no, I wouldn't encourage you to do it, but I'm sure there's more to such an enticing offer, and the facts might sway me to change my mind. Who was the person they wanted you to beat up? Where do you live? Where does the client live? What are the laws? What are the circumstances? Is the client a quadriplegic who was literally kicked around for years until he came into billions of dollars?

Bitcoins are more like stocks than pyramid schemes. People could acquire them very cheaply early on, and it happens that they're worth more now, but that's not because they were promised to be worth anything in the future. They're valuable because people want them, which is what makes anything valuable, not because people are tricked into buying them based on some fraudulent guarantee of a rate of return in dollars, or because people earn residuals on subsequent transfers of bitcoins. If all other currencies disappeared, bitcoins could still have value.

To be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate here. I wouldn't buy bitcoins myself (at least not right now), but I think it's overly simplistic to say that they're immoral or a scam.

Small pickups are light trucks, but light trucks are not limited to small pickups. In other words, if the tariff was "a large factor," one would expect to see correlation in vans, minivans, SUVs, and other pickup truck sales.

In my observations, pickup owners who actually tow or use their truck for anything other than daily driving seem to be a corner case. Though to be fair, people who actually use them more often than "moving, or helping friends move" tend to use them a lot. Those people should probably stick to diesel. The other 99% should be fine with electric.