So, be aware of your audience?

There was at least one American on board.

Because some relatively small number of events may have a conspiratorial aspect does not mean all events do. In this case, it does appear that a bunch of separatists in Ukraine got their hands on some pretty sophisticated hardware and, obviously by accident, blew a civilian airliner out of the sky. Now, that's not as sexy an explanation as secret US operatives standing in the bushes near the separatists, or secret Russian operatives bringing the plane down in an even more elaborate scheme to make the West look bad by making themselves look bad so they can say "Those rotten Americans are trying to make us look bad."

Something like this was bound to happen when relatively poorly trained and disciplined weekend warriors get their hands on serious military hardware. The Russians have been quite keen to back the separatists with weapons, intelligence and some of their own personnel. It would be nice that if they are going to allow these separatists to use advanced AA equipment that maybe they have someone nearby who actually knows how to use such equipment, or at very least to put a bullet in the head of some daft nimrod who thinks he knows how to use the equipment.

"bascially, tt looks like what needs to be done is the PHP runtime needs to be tightned up."

Boy, you could put that on the PHP developers headstones.

Winston Churchill confessed, guiltily, in his History of WWII, to being happy at the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, because he knew at that moment, the Germans had lost the war.

You know, I'm beginning to think conspiratorial thinking is just another form of apathy. "Oh well, it's probably made up, so I'll sit in my cocoon, spout my paranoia on the Internet on occasion, and play PS3 the rest of the time."

But it will generally affect competitors equally. Two different taxi companies, or two different electricity generating companies that use coal. Or two different hotels of the same class and size in the same city.

And since competing businesses tend to have to lower prices in order to remain competitive in the same market as they pursue the same prospective customer, the tax burden is going to raise costs (and lower margins) more or less the same for both (or several) parties.

So, you ready to start a fork? :)

But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices. To the businesses in question, it just goes in one door and out the other. You want to use the heavy hand of the tax collector to damage people's behavior in a way that makes them go out less, drive less, spend less, do less? Tax citizens directly, with a very special line item they can't miss, that says "carbon tax, because you exist" - and they'll act. Well, mostly they'll act to elect people who will undo that tax, but they'll act.

"First, let me say that I was talking about workplace harassment."

For a Roman Catholic Priest, the Church is his workplace, the congregation his customers, the Bishop is his management. For an extremely bad Roman Catholic Priest, it is a very bad idea for the customers to complain to the management about sex abuse. It is in fact the direct cause of the scandal, that the misconduct was reported to the Bishop and not to the police.

There is a lesson in that for any organization.

" People can always call the police (or file a lawsuit), and obviously if your organization covers for harassers then that's the next step. "

It is a safe assumption that all organizations WILL cover for the harassers, because as you point out,
"escalating to the courts is expensive, time-consuming, embarrassing" for the organization, and in the end, the organization only cares about what is profitable for the organization.

But if we fail to do it, we merely perpetuate the rape culture.

Yes. The US tried very hard to push the EU to put much stronger sanctions into place, but key EU players; in particular Germany (which does a lot of business with Russia), was unwilling to sign on for anything more than the lukewarm sanctions.

I have a feeling he's going to get a bullet to the head fairly soon.

I thought it was the US's fault. Isn't every single bad that has happened in the last 75 years the fault of America?

If you've got a gun in a crowd, you don't really need to aim much to hit a lot of people. The tape part was facetious, but not that facetious - the system wouldn't need to be complex at all.

And no, aiming is not really that hard (unless you have a long range, or high precision requirements). Lots of non-genius hobbyists have made systems that identify short range moving targets, point at them and shoot (look on YouTube). It's a "science fair" level project that I could have done (with current tech, anway) in high school. If you actually had someone experienced in machine vision and robotics, you could identify specific people and shoot off their index fingers from 200 meters, but you wouldn't need any special expertise to just shoot some dudes.

And being on a quadcopter actually makes it easier, as you don't have to kludge together a bunch of motors/servos (like the people fooling around with paintball guns on YouTube): you can use the quadcopters movement (the hard parts of which are a solved problem from your perspective) to target primarily by translation. Simply put, you just move left until "that moving thing" is in the middle of your field of vision. And, within 10 or 20 feet, as long as your gun is pointing basically the same direction as your camera, you're done. You probably hit a good percentage of the time.

Now it's quite possible you wouldn't get many shots off with each drone (though I think you would, as long as you put any thought into your gun mount and cartridge management) - but if you had even a modest budget you could make up for that with numbers. Again, it's a high damage, "high terror" attack with modest budget requirements, modest expertise requirements, and low personal commitment.

(The reality is that there's lots of attacks like this that you could cobble together if you were smart - this isn't a new thing with drones. But drones do give you options that are particularly problematic to defend against).