"They asked me, 'Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?' and I said, 'Yes I am,'" he said. "I had my 40mm Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, 'If you cross my sidewalk, there's gonna be another shooting.'"

ok that's very aggressive.

You know, I generally don't agree with open carry ... most of the world cringes at that, and it's something Americans cherish.

But if your drone was hovering in my backyard looking at my teenage daughters for no good reason, and if I'd shot it down and you were about to come onto my property in a threatening manner without explanation, I can see the point.

The drone pilot was being an ass, and about to trespass in an aggressive manner.

I actually hope the guy who shot it down just gets a small fine and let go. Because the drone hovering in your backyard isn't the kind of shit we should be accepting.

"Because our rights are being trampled daily," he said. "Not on a local level only - but on a state and federal level."

why did he have to bring the tea party into this?

It is entirely possible to think the Tea Party are loons and also think this guy has a point.

There simply can't be a free for all in which anybody for any reason can be going around peering into peoples private yards and houses just because they want to.

And, I'm sorry, but hovering over someone's backyard with a camera falls in the category of "no bloody way". Not for private citizens, corporations, or law enforcement without a warrant.

The article says 40mm Glock - that is a damn big pistol

Which could only be a typo, or a gun carrier who doesn't understand bullet sizing. And I'm going to assume the guy from Kentucky doing open carry knew what he had, in which case, just blame the reporter.

A 40mm bullet would be just over 1.5" in diameter... that would be an enormous round, and probably not something you could fire from a man-portable weapon.

A frigging .50 cal is a half inch in diameter, so that would be 3x the size.

A 40mm bullet? No way.

Ignore the above, the Glock 40 is what he was open carrying, he did in fact use a shotgun on the drone.

If you read TFA, he was open-carrying a Glock 40, which if Google isn't lying to me is a .40 cal weapon.

A stray .40 caliber bullet isn't birdshot, it's a pretty heavy duty bullet.

This isn't pellets falling out of the sky harmlessly.

You have rather high expectations of the average consumer.

You know what, I don't ... I have exceedingly low expectations of them. I simply don't give a crap any more if people buy this stuff and get hacked.

I tell people I know about the risks, the rest I stopped caring about.

It's not their fault, it's our fault. We need to make products that are secure by default

And for that, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of corporations for not giving a damn, and lawmakers for not holding them accountable.

Yes, I know, it probably makes me a bad person. But I'm afraid my "sympathy-for-the-hacked" is at an all time low, because in a week or so there will be another story just like this one.

I think two cores is enough for most purposes

Really? I'm surprised by that.

Over time I've found the extra cores goes a long way to a better experience.

It means I can be using two browsers, ripping a CD to MP3, possibly streaming through my Apple TV, and still have a responsive system. This may not be 'normal' for most people (which has never been my goal), nor is running the several VMs I always have up with Linux and FreeBSD. But it is actually representative of how I use it.

I don't ever find myself taxing my video card since I'm not a gamer. In fact, I'm pretty sure my video card is a cheapo generic Nvidia with 1GB of RAM (which I'm old enough to be in awe of being cheap and generic), and I couldn't tell you the framerate of anything I've ever done.

But over the years I've found the extra cores means the system can stay more responsive under load without bogging down.

Even for my daily desktop, I find the 8 cores means I can do a bunch of things in parallel without needing to worry about it.

Hell, my wife's 4 year old HP laptop I think has at least 2 cores on it, and it wasn't exactly leading edge when we got it.

Unless you're the kind of person who launches a program, uses it, closes it, and then launches the next program (do people actually do that?) I've found that tons of CPU and RAM means the machine will be more usable for a lot longer than if you went with less. And it usually means your machine can be bloat proof for a lot longer without becoming horribly slow.

If a human is in my backyard, I can say "what the hell are you doing in my backyard", and then tell them to get the hell out.

If a drone is hovering in my backyard, I have no such recourse and have to assume the worse.

This isn't like shooting people and asking questions later. Not even a little.

Not sure about the discharge of the firearm and where he was, but the drone had no business hovering over someone's yard.

My machine is by no means blisteringly fast and I built it for chump change but I've got 500GB of SSD, 16GB of RAM and eight cores. I give a shit about bloat. In principle, I care very much. In practice, it is not really affecting me any more.

Obviously you are concerned about bloat ... which is why you seem to have the same machine as I do. You future proof yourself against bloat by over-building it up front. Worked well for my last machine, which lasted me 5+ years.

Me, my machine is about 5 months old, running Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell installed and all the Metro crap, apps, and the Microsoft store disabled/shoved out of the way, and again with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM.

I have no intention of upgrading this machine to Windows 10 now, possibly not ever. But sure as hell not with that in-place update to what I consider an OS barely out of beta.

My trust in Microsoft to do an in-place upgrade without breaking things or removing functionality I've had to add back is precisely zero. And I've already had to uninstall and block the update which wanted to start nagging me to upgrade.

With 4 cores and 8GB of RAM I happily ran Vista for years (no, really :-), because with huge amounts of resources it was pretty damned good. I expect to do the same on my Windows 8.1 machine.

So far, I don't think a single "feature" Microsoft claims to have "innovated" is either compelling or something I haven't found a 3rd party app to do (like virtual desktops). The digital assistant and some of the other stuff? That gets a big giant "do not want".

Who knows, maybe next summer when Windows 10 has been beta tested and all of the warts fixed I'll consider upgrading while it's still free. But I'm sure as hell not being an early adopter.

The organization's entire reason to exist is to form patent pools to bring together disparate parties and avoid a fractured market where members' technologies don't get adopted due to overly-complex licensing terms or fears of patent suits.

Otherwise known as collusion by predatory trade groups presenting a barrier of entry to new players.

Just because a bunch of CEOs work out a deal to fuck us all over doesn't make it a good thing.

One set of greedy bastards vs another set of greedy bastards isn't good for anybody but greedy bastards. It sure as hell isn't a defense of terribly written and overly broad software patents.

I think that software patents could be a bit more palatable if they also had to provide source code that was proven to compile and work as describe in the patent.

The problem you should not be able to patent an algorithm, and software patents have nothing to do with source code.

Software patents often read as "a system and methodology for doing something we all learned about in school but applied to a specific problem and now you can't do it, suckers".

They're patents on an idea or a solution to a class of problem. They claim ownership of something stupid like "encrypting a bank transaction over an internet link" or some other stupid thing like that.

With software, if somebody patents the idea of compressing a video

See, this is where software patents become bullshit ... you can't patent an idea, you can't patent an algorithm. I can't patent the idea of a flying car, I can patent the specifics of my novel invention.

Compression has existed since people first figured out what the Lev-Zimpel algorithm actually meant. Compression exists as a thing ... making digital stuff smaller by identifying encodings to save space. It's like caching, where you keep copies closer to where you deliver it. It's a concept.

You can't subsequently claim to patent compression of a specific thing. You can patent your implementation, but if you are patenting the idea of compressing video, your patent should be null and void.

What you can't do is patent a "system and methodology for doing something we already do but applied to a specific class thing". Especially when your patent is taking 10 things everybody knows how to do, stringing them together, and simply saying "ta da, patent bitches".

That would be like a carpenter patenting the idea of a fucking table.

Pretty much every software patent I've ever seen falls into the category of claiming an entire idea based on vague notions and existing methods already string together in ways that if you said "I want to do this" any CS undergrad could tell you how to do it at a high level based on the tools which already exist.

"Market adoption of DASH technology standards has increased to the point where the market would benefit from the availability of a convenient nondiscriminatory, nonexclusive worldwide one-stop patent pool license."

Which roughly translates into "Wouldn't it be awesome if all you bitches had to keep paying us money?".

So many software patents are bloody terrible. They're stuff we all learned about in school, applied to a specific thing, and then made so generic as to claim ownership of pretty an entire class of computing.

This entity needs to stop existing, as they're really nothing but parasites pretending they invented anything.

Assholes.

Wow, you mean commercial products designed to connect to the internet have absolutely crap security?

Well, color me fucking surprised and shocked.

No, wait, the other one .. where I point out these companies are either incompetent or indifferent to security, have no penalties or liability, and have products rushed out the door by asshole CEOs and marketing people who don't give a damn about security.

This is precisely why I look at pretty much every damned product which wants to connect to the internet, or has an app for your smartphone and think "oh hell no".

Trusting this shit is idiotic, and quite frankly, I'm beyond the point of sympathy for people who buy this shit. It's insecure so that it can be convenient. Pretty much at least weekly we see an entire class of products has pretty much zero security. And we're a long way away from being able to trust them.

Just stop buying this crap.

If slashdot does fail to get bought, and disappears, as seems all too likely, everybody go on over to pipedot. Heck, even if that doesn't happen, please split your time and spend some over there too. The site engineering is superb. All it needs is 10 or 100 times the user base.

utterly stupid âoefrom theâ

Would you mind translating that drivel into something intelligible? Did you bother previewing?

It strikes me that the userbase of SN has a very strong international makeup, with a substantial portion having a pronounced anti-US viewpoint. SD seems largely US or at least pro-US, and also a fair representation of right-of-center viewpoints. On SN you're some kind of weirdo if you don't join the mob raking the US over the coals for everything. Moderation reflects this bias.

But SN has a better ratio of signal to noise, and a higher user IQ, or at least far fewer assholes with an IQ of 50 or under.

Both sites are highly useful. I'd hate for either one to be lost. I'm shaking in fear that (1) nobody will pick up slashdot and it will be abandoned and disappear, or (2) a real piece of shit will pick up slashdot and the result will be unrecognizable and unusable, an orer of magnitude worse than beta ever was.

Far and away the best-engineered site technically? Pipedot, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is awe-inspiringly well engineered. It just doesn't have a critical mass.