It's an exclusive deal that kicks in this Fall.

At the moment, downloaded "purchases" from the iTunes Store, Netflix, and Amazon don't have ads. Replayable, scrubbable, etc.

With this deal, viewers pay three times to watch. Once for cable/internet service, second by watching on Comedy Central, and then third via Hulu plus un-skippable ads, if you like an occasional re-run. Yeech!

Similarly, I've seen the rotorwash of an LAPD copter, 50 feet above my street, blow 4' X 8' plywood panels dangerously airborne in the construction site across the street. Grit was thrown in my face.

This was around 3:00 am, and NOT in LA City proper. If only I'd grabbed my camera...

Government, police, etc will always be corrupt. Always. People are people. The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, with no excess or space for overreach. It's all about taxes. . .

Close, but wrong. It's all about the purse-strings.

Elected leaders, held to account, will reign in organizational misbehavior by tightening the purse-strings (cutting their budget).

Government, like many things, is a necessary evil. Flat-out saying that "paying taxes is wrong!" solves nothing. Because, you see, there will always be someone in charge.

Hold them to account, and they will hold departments, etc. within their purview to account.

If you want zero taxes, go to Somalia.

I bought a SoundBlaster card for four-channel audio for my Mac >10 years ago. It did not work.

Cretive Labs' management clearly had decided to dump Macs, as months of emails with "we're trying to work on driver fixes, but, but, but," rang hollow.

I'm not worthy of your hardware, despite me giving you money? OK. Your choice.

Creative Labs has been dead to me for >10 years, and will remain so. I can get my A/D & D/A converters elsewhere, and I do. I program and use them, actually. And I teach University classes in the subject. Guess what provider never gets a mention.

Any company who gives a paying customer the middle finger deserves animosity, sharing of info with other consumers, and generally, well, eventually being overtaken by a business that provides what consumers pay them for.

Well, when your business model is to use donated, individual efforts to build a database —a database that you then use to make money via advertising with no contributor compensation. . .

Well, don't be surprised when some "hired gun" pretends to be one of us altruistic citizens contributing to your database. And they make stuff up.

SEO guys. Google Map spammers. The list goes on forever.

These "crowd-sourced" businesses, making money off of the altruism of anonymous individuals, have it coming to them. There is no free ride.

Reason A can, and does turn into reason B.

That is, chronic exposure leads to physiological dependence.

"Self-medicating" is fine for a month or two, but during that time one should seek a psychiatrist who can prescribe something to replace that "escapism" need. Hopefully.

If one does find a good advisor, and one follows the advice and prescriptions, normalcy and acceptance can soon follow. (Soon being within the scale of a human life-span, maybe 5 years.)

Hang in there! It will get better.

Animats: Laser weapons are in the same state - there are working demos, but they're not worth the trouble yet. Diode laser powered weapons are now up to 10KW (big array of 10W or so diodes), and can shoot down small rockets and artillery shells in demos. Current thinking is that, at 50KW-100KW, they'll be militarily useful.

Navy has (or is testing) some higher-powered ones, basically five or ten welding lasers strapped together, but the power and cooling requirements are huge.

Worthless article without images.

Even some of the web-linked articles don't have images.

Bad click-bait article aside, it is typical that the USA (and other nations) develop weapons systems that they never end up "needing to use." Weapons systems can be seen as a kind of insurance policy, but it can be damned hard from keeping the hawks from wanting to go play with their toys (kill people) all the time.

When I've lived in northern climates, I've occasionally had a couple of tanning sessions to fight the winter blues. It works great.

I use this in my classes — the myDAQ from National Instruments (DAQ=digital acquisition).

It's USB plug-and-play, with a few basics like oscilloscope (200 kS/s, 16-bit), DSA (digital signal analyzer), signal generator, and Bode analyzer built-in, through use of it's "ELVISmx Instrument Launcher." Better yet is that it comes with a non-expiring copy of LabView.

It has:
* DMM ports (digital multimeter)
* 8 digital I/O
* A/D audio I/O, +/-2 V
* A/D I/O, +/- 10V
* Power supply +/- 15 V
* Counter

Cost it $180, for example through www.studica.com.

[citation needed]

I fear for my (soon to be former) country.

How many Roadside Bombs did we have in the USA in 2013?

None? Well, how about 2012?

None? Well, how about 2011?

None? Well, how about 2010?

Continue, ad infinitum.

If law enforcement needs this type of equipment, then it has long abandoned any pretense of serving the people and has instead reverted to its original purpose of fighting the people for those in power.

Indeed. "To protect and to serve..." has been perverted into "To protect (ourselves) and to serve (those in power)..."

What I wonder every time I see this: do the law enforcement officers involved ever think something like, "wow, by doing this I become one of the jack-booted thugs working hard to bring tyranny and corruption to this nation!" Are they complete myrmidons?

Anyone with an IQ above 105-110 is barred from becoming a police officer.

Examples abound, in the US and elsewhere, so I'll let you find examples of this long-known fact.