We had toy helicopters for years before we had drones. There's a huge difference as "drones" fly autonomously or semi-autonomously. If you've ever watched liveleak videos of drone use you'll note the thing flies itself, the operator works on targeting and killing people. The interface is extremely high level. The operator marks an area as the target and the software alters the flight path and camera angle to make that area available for attack.

A toy helicopter, on the other hand, is directly flown by the operator and generally has a rolling camera that simply aims straight ahead or is simply movable by the operator.

You can turn a toy helicopter into a drone with the right software, but they are otherwise *very* different things. Calling it a drone is done simply to invoke images of people flying actual drones over the middle east and therefore make it scary.

Hobbyists have been flying toy helicopters far longer than that without incident. Don't let the FAA shit in this punchbowl any more than they already have.

Can we just call it what it is? It's a "toy helicopter", not a "drone". That helps get the conversation on the right track.

No, not every industry. Typically cronies get subsidies.

I agree with that, but keep in mind that Apple has a couple hundred billion dollars in the bank right now. They have more money than the federal government and they don't even have the machines to print it. Think about that.

That's not saying there can never be a decline - even Rome fell. But Apple nearly died in the 1990s and ran out of cash. At this point they could quit selling products and they'd still have enough cash to coast along for decades (the cash is invested). It's a whole nother ball game.

Microsoft is essentially in the same boat, by the way.

I've thought the same thing (many times) but I wonder if it'll be possible - if not easy - to simply change out the "guts" of it every couple of years when a new model comes out. I mean, the actual watch is worth a few hundred bucks, right? So if I dropped $10K for one upgrading it two years from now for $300 is a bargain. It should be possible to remove the old watch from the case and drop a new one in as long as Apple doesn't change the form factor. And my guess is that there's less desire to change the form factor given that this is a piece that goes on someone's wrist and it's already about as big as a watch should be.

Yeah, until..... someone creates the Breitling Navitimer app for the Apple watch!

Hell, I can be among 5 different "in crowds" now. I'll get a Rolex app for it, too!

If it were truly "economical" the government wouldn't be subsidizing it. I think that's a big part of the "upsetting".

Because there's no need to destroy a big chunk of desert. Honestly, it's worth twice as much since the land is already "destroyed" and my roof is sitting there empty. People act like solar isn't environmentally destructive but it is - not to the extent that a coal plant is (and the destruction is limited to the immediate area of the plant).

My roof should either be a solar collector or painted white. Right now it's a solar collector and I'm paying good money in the summer to take the collected heat and move it to an air conditioning unit at the side of the house.

Actually, reading through all that I was thinking of "why do you need a faster internet connection?" The answer is "I'll know when I get it".

Same thing with the moon. Maybe all their reasons are BS right now, but with people putting a lot of $ into it someone will figure something out.

I totally agree, and I will say that if I were going to drop that kind of money on a watch it would be a Rolex that I would have the rest of my life. Right now, I'm wearing a citizen eco-drive - I think a Skyhawk - that I paid $300 or $400 for in 2002. Do you think anybody's going to be wearing their Apple iwatch 12 years from now?

Anyway, what I was going to say is that my feeling from experience is that the $10K Apple watch is probably not going to be worn by truly wealthy people who can afford it, but rather by wannabes who want to look the part. The "fake it until you make it" crowd. The ones who bought the "I Am Rich" app (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich).

PHP is awful regardless of who uses it. The language was created as a Perl for Dummies and never moved beyond its roots until version 5 (which retains backward compatibility with all the madness). Any "extensions" - such as the ability to access an RDBMS server - had to be compiled in to the interpreter since the language initially didn't have the various pieces necessary to write such connecting code in actual PHP. And these extensions simply dumped a bunch of crap into the global namespace. So, if you compiled in support for MySQL, you ended up with a bunch of "mysql_whatever" functions to call. Better yet, there was little to no coordination between projects so mysql_whatever functions may or may not have analogous pgsql_whatever functions should you want to change to another RDBMS.

While a lot of that has been fixed there are simply a lot of historical problems like that. I don't see those sorts of issues in C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, or most other modern languages. No, PHP is a breed apart.

Other than that I agree with most of what you say. I don't find C++ to be terrible but I haven't touched it in 15 years, either.

Spot on. We just found out the the Ferguson "judge" responsible for jailing people who owe a few hundred dollars on a parking fine actually owes $170,000 to the IRS.

The bottom line is that people in power don't think the rules apply to them. Under rule of law, the rules do apply to them. But as we've seen more and more lately it's difficult to enforce the rules when they rule the enforcement mechanisms.

I mean, the only security they seemed to be interested in was keeping the emails out of the hands of people with subpoenas, FOIA requests and such.

Makes a gun of little value for self defense unless one has a quick open gun safe. Guns are used over a million times per year in this country for self defense. Suicides clock in at 1.5% of that (on the high end) and perhaps 1% of that. I know it's hard to understand but guns are very useful for self defense. Unfortunately, they're useful for suicide, too. The answer isn't statutory law.

I'm as much "in the tech community" as anybody I know and I'd never heard of them. Browsing their web site and reading about the apple watch, well, I don't know. I still don't know what they were doing.