Spoken like someone who has never actually built and or operated one.

More likely than a direct hit on the drone by a shell (likely to make the drone drop straight out of the sky, probably in multiple pieces) is the prospect of some debris getting into one or more of the brushless motors. This could cause the motor to overheat, or cause the ESC talking to it to get things wrong. The flight controller can get confused by this, and you could end up with a high battery drain, and the machine doing a nice tilt to one side, with the remaining props spinning way up to try to maintain lift ... presto. From a few hundred feet, the drone could go into a high speed dive at an angle that could very quickly close the distance between the fireworks range (over the water) and the people on the ground. How'd you like 1500g of high-speed hardware coming at your head at, say, 35mph, in the dark, complete with high-speed spinning carbon fiber knives and a flammable LiPo battery onboard.

Beyond all of that, this is about public perception. The complete tool who did this is practically begging to have members of the public pile onto the FAA's existing effort to, in practice, shut down this entire hobby and almost every attempt to put these tools to work in research and business. Gee, thanks.

Go sit in a corner! Thou shalt never bring those two words in close proximity, for should they ever come in contact, the reaction could destroy reality as we know it!

I didn't see SystemC, either, but may have missed it. But the real question is what the stats would look like if you only included Wishbone-compliant usage?

There should have been modifiers for typical bugs per kloc and security holes per kloc.

Also, there are many more layers to the industry. Scientific computing? Avionics? Publishing?

The subdivisions between languages are also a bit... strange. Java/Oak isn't truly uniform, whatever anyone claims. C and C++ have standards that aren't always backwards-compatible - if you ignore such changes, why bother listing C# or D as distinct? Lump the lot, together with B and BCPL under a single header.

My guess is that accurate representation of languages isn't possible (when does a dialect become a distinct language?) but that if it was, none of the so-called "big three" languages would be in the top 10. Computer languages are as bad as natural languages when it comes to classifiers.

Last, but by no means least, people rarely directly code any more. They code within engines, usually using some weird fringe language nobody has ever heard of that turns out to be Lua or Visual Basic with the keywords words renamed for the theme. Real programmers (as opposed to integer or complex programmers) tend to be in the minority, have become rarer after Qualcomm outlawed them, and are mostly in mourning for Freshmeat. But as a lot are Goths anyway, it's hard to tell.

Already done. Check the Slashdot archives for the Vi vs Emacs paintball fight.

When I were a lad, we had to program in 96 bytes! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!

Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.

With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.

The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.

SpaceX do not "already have" a Falcon 9 heavy, its still in development and won't have its first launch until next year at the earliest.

I guess you are forgetting the multitude of Flash and Java applet vulnerabilities that have come to light over the past few years, most of them cross platform in nature.

I think the main issue I have is that this EC spokesman is expecting Google to make decisions regarding the public interest rather than erring on the side of caution and removing everything - the moment they do make decisions regarding the public interest, you can bet your arse they will be hauled back into court and have to justify themselves.

So by going to the extreme and implementing the ruling across the board (barring obvious requests that can be rejected), Google is protecting themselves and showing what a stupid ruling it is in the first place. There is no alternative approach that Google can take that doesn't open them up to further legal action.

Because that's the faction that runs the man who runs the US senate and who runs the man who runs the executive branch of the government.

The same could be said for any emerging technology. That argument would have applied when SSL was new. Maybe one day Tor will be standard, you buy a new computer, get online, and it's using Tor without you ever changing any settings. The EFF is already saying that everyone should use Tor. At this point, the only reason it's not the norm is because it's fairly new. I wouldn't be surprised if we see computers within a couple years marketed with privacy in mind that come with Tor already installed and configured, or ISPs adding exit nodes to their networks as a PR privacy initiative.

I remember when Patriot passed, I was very suspicious of it. It all got rammed through the system a little too easily considering the power it granted to the government. Everyone was so gung-ho at the time though. That also reminds me of when we decided to bail out all the big banks. I was the only person at the dinner table saying that they should be allowed to fail and that other, more responsible, banks would buy up the pieces and life in the free market would go on. Everyone was giving me reasons why that wouldn't work, and then years later they were trying to tell me why the banks should have been allowed to fail.

It seems that people forget about their convictions really easily in the face of extraordinary circumstances. The fact is that those circumstances are the most important time to keep your convictions. Patriot should have never been passed. The promise to repeal it was the entire reason I voted for Obama the first time. Bastard really got me, didn't he?

Get shelved by Democrats, you mean. Ask Harry Reid (who sets the legislative agenda in the Senate) about his priorities, if he can articulate them in a complete, unmuddled sentence that doesn't include assertions about how his party has no rich donors, etc.

If this were the House, the tone of the comments here would be all about specifically named anti-science conservatives, not "politicians." Why aren't we naming the anti-science liberals behind this cut?

That's more than a feeling, that's a fact.