... as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."

I recently too a course titled "Ethics in International Relations" at a major college. (This was to fulfill a distribution requirement for an "ethics" class and the particular course had the bonus of also fulfilling an international affairs requirement.)

One of the first points made:
  * Which regions are part of which countries is NOT a subject of international ethics.
A fait accopli is accepted as is. (This was taken as a universal, part of the definition of the boundaries of the field (as taught), which otherwise studied many different, often conflicting, schools of thought.

I interpret this as follows: "International Ethics", as a dicipline, is an attempt by academics (and the rich people who fund them - such as Andrew Carnegie, who largely founded the field) to influence governments, primarily to improve their treatment of the people they rule and otherwise use force upon. ("Improved" being viewed throught the biases of the academics in question.)

In order to sway the behavior of rulers - especially those who are oppressing their long-standing citizens, recent conquests, or those with whom they are considering resolving a dispute with force, they have to appear non-threatening to the rulers' core issue: that the ruler is in charge. So they must strictly avoid challenging WHETHER the rulers rule, sticking to issues of HOW they rule.

So don't expect academia to support any move for self-determination by the people of an occupied region. The rulers that make the claim and have the power to enforce it will be passively accepted.

DO expect them to oppose such people arming themselves to assert a right to self-determination, or even anyone speaking in a way that might "lead to conflict" rather than passification and quiet (but mainly non-violent) suffering. Thus you see them supporting things like censorship of speech an arms blockades to regions of conflict - which are then selectively enforced and lead to "ethnic clensing" genocides by the side that more successfully evades them against the side that is now largely disarmed.

(Example on censorship: During the period where the Benghazi attack was being blamed on a video posted on YouTube, Sarah Chayes, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an op-ed for the L.A. times calling for its censorship.)

Given the number of bugs (security and otherwise) in so many applications, there must be 10 metric trainloads of "small skill" programmers out there.

As safe as juggling very long, very, very greasy sharp knives while skating on very thin ice...

I would love to do some recreational flying, but I can't afford to with a family and a mortgage and many expenses. And I couldn't justify it as an expensive hobby before then.

The point was simply that people don't fly because it isn't economically viable to do so. The number of pilot's licenses isn't an indication of people's ability to fly or their inclination to do so. It is an indication of the expense of flying which is partly the result of FAA regulations and the lack of efficient mass production of light aircraft.

Personally I don't have a pilots license because I don't have the money to waste on something that is of no economic benefit. If I could fly from point A to point B and get their in half the time and avoid traffic for similar costs to a car, then I would learn and adapt. And so would a lot of other people.

Even if not everyone is suited to flying, as you suggest, then getting a portion of the population off the roads would still make a huge impact on traffic and ultimately allow us to grow our economy without needing to make diminishing return type of investments in transportation infrastructure.

Why does a small jet engine have to cost too much? A quick search of jet turbines for model aircraft shows that the 52lbs max thrust P200-SX from JetCat costs $5,495. Sure you would need 6 or 7 of these to get an average sized adult off the ground vertically with some minimal airframe, but we aren't talking about millions of dollars we are talking about something under $100k to put together some sort of ultralight VTOL.

I think the best flying car hope right now is actually in the small autonomous UAV space, but we need the FAA to start allowing more commercial development of UAVs in certain areas away from heavily populated areas.

All the other technical hurdles seem pretty manageable for at least moving us along the cost/performance curve to make small VTOL aircraft more affordable for more people.

Is that literally all it takes to make ASA?

There are some good info graphics on actual data here. PC has 51% of the playtime marketshare and consoles only have 30%. http://www.superdataresearch.c...

Free to play games are where the big money is now. League of Legends made $624 million in revenue in 2013. They even gave out $14.3 Million in tournament prize money.
Crossfire (a counter-strike clone popular outside the USA) had the most revenue and made almost a billion dollars in revenue last year.

No. Acetylsalicylic acid replaces salicylic acid, because the side effects are worse. Otherwise, we'd be popping SA pills instead of ASA pills.

Dang. Typo broke the first, more-punchline-worthy, Schlock link.

I'm really begining to hate the keyboard on this new laptop.

This actually looks good to me. Most helicopters can be shot down with a rifle. They are huge engines with large fuel tanks and large, whirling blades, and it is not that difficult to get them to destroy themselves with their own momentum, height, or fuel.

I concur. Helicopters are a collection of single-points-of-failure, disasters waiting to happen. (Particularly the pilot - they have to be continuously controlled and crash almost instantly if anything incapacitates him.) Their vulnerability is justified only because their extreme usefulness oughtweighs it. With eight rotors I'd be surprised if this vehicle couldn't at least come to ground safely with at least two of them destroyed, and the multicopter approach has been under autonomous computer control from the start - made practical only by the automation.

I envision this thing's missions as being primarily extreme rough-country ground transport, with short hops to bypass otherwise impassible terrain, reach otherwise inaccessible destinations or targets, attack from above, or put on a burst of speed when time is of the essence. Think a truck-sized "super jeep" ala Superman. Being primarily a ground vehicle lets it perform longer missions and reduces its visibility and vulnerability compared to a helicopter.

Just because you CAN fly doesn't mean you DO fly all the time. As is pointed out in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary: "Do you know what they call flying soldiers on the battlefield?" ... "Skeet!"

Air, land and water are just too different.

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

I know a coal miner. He is the greatest male model to ever live.

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.