Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.

The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.

What you don't know about fusion
Could fill a shelf of books
You are the type of man who looks
For new miraculous advances
But overestimates the chances
Of breaking-even on the power flow
You only have to open up your mouth to show
What you don't know
About!
Fusion!

The world's small farmers are already being driven out of business by automated mass-production farming that their labor-intensive, small-scale methods can't compete with, and that they can't afford to replicate. Cheap, easy-to-use small-scale automation could allow them to grow food more cheaply, making them more competitive, not less. I doubt that any of them enjoy doing back-breaking field labor for 10 hours a day for very little compensation; why wouldn't they want a robot that could do the tedious labor for them?

Not to mention that anyone with a sufficiently capable farm-bot could use it raise their own crops to eat, and would therefore no longer need to go searching for a menial job in order to feed their family. Win-win!

There are the ethics of the money collected, but that can be fixed. I'm more concerned about the inequity of the penalty. If I had to pay a $300.00 fine for a red light violation, it would be slightly annoying. If my unemployed neighbor had to pay $300.00, he'd fall further behind on his rent, or possibly go hungry. Conversely, if I had to unexpectedly sit in jail for a day, my projects would suffer, my employer would have no sympathy, and my job might be at stake; while my neighbor would simply wait out his days with little else of consequence. So if I know the penalty is monetary, I can afford to run the occasional red light. If we know the penalty is to serve time, my neighbor might run a red light just to get three squares.

How to best create a fair penalty is a difficult proposition.

If you watch the video at the bottom of the article, you'll see photos of several prototype FarmBots that do, in fact, exist.

I think there's definitely a market for this. For example, I'd like to have a nice vegetable garden in my back yard, but I don't have the expertise or the free time to do the work necessary to keep it healthy and happy. If I could buy a FarmBot at the local Home Depot, set it up, press "Go", and not worry about it until harvest time, that would be a pretty tempting prospect. And once the technology got cheap enough and reliable enough for most people to afford and install, anyone with some land could easily grow their own organic produce, exactly to their own specifications. For people who don't have their own land, neighborhoods could do slightly larger-scale versions of the same thing in the community gardens. Peoples' ability to feed themselves (rather than rely on buying food from large corporations) would increase, which can only be a good thing.

The whole reason they made noise was the leak. It was public, so they had to Do Something(tm), There was no real surprise at spying allegations, just a public show.

So guilt does not apply. It is to determine responsibility, not guilt. There is a major legal difference, and trials proceed differently. Hence you can have OJ Simpson found innocent of a murder, but civilly responsible for causing wrongful death of the same individual.

No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.

The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.

But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.

So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.

To avoid arguments. If the cops say 11 km/h over an artificially 10 km/h low limit then you weren't speeding just a little, if they said 1 km/h over the limit people go all "waaaaaaa it was only 1 km/h" and "waaaaaaaa your equipment must be off I went 1km/h under". "I wasn't speeding that much" holds a lot less sway than "I wasn't speeding".

It's even illegal to stare in my front window from the sidewalk, or with binoculars, even if my curtains are open.

I've always wondered what the guidelines are for something like this in various jurisdictions. I live in Phoenix, and for about a year I lived in an apartment complex with some very large and revealing sliding glass doors that all face an interior common area (swimming pool, etc.) — naturally, most residents kept their curtains closed most of the time for privacy. There was one guy, however, who kept his curtains wide open seemingly 24/7, and he always had a bunch of crazy crap on the walls so that you couldn't help but feel your gaze drawn to glance that way while you were going about your business.

The common area was a semi-public area; residents had keys for when the common area was locked, but guests didn't need special permission to be there.

So one day this guy walks out of his apartment onto his patio wearing nothing but a bathrobe and holding an alcoholic beverage in his hand, demanding to know why I'm looking into his apartment (as I had apparently done so multiple times while going to/from my own apartment). Then he demanded, in a slurred and drunken manner, that I not look into his apartment. Putting aside the issue of whether or not my neighbor was in fact guilty of public intoxication, I still don't know if he had a legal leg to stand on. Had I pressed the issue, would a judge have considered his request reasonable? (Demanding that people not look through an unobscured window that is larger than the dimensions of most human beings and is at ground level where pedestrians are likely to travel doesn't seem to be very reasonable or practical, but the law doesn't necessarily have to be written in a reasonable manner.)

Note that I didn't "pause" to watch for an extended period of time, nor did I have binoculars, nor did I have anything like a camera. (Camera phones weren't even a thing at this point in time.) The point being, if someone has a very expansive view of their own privacy rights, they will not be deterred even if the law is not on their side. This is also why photographers are being accosted by security guards more and more frequently under the guise of "no photography" policies in public places (e.g., Grand Central Terminal) where no such policies actually exist. I shudder to think what some Phoenix residents are going to do if this ordinance passes since quadcopters are popular items sold in the Phoenix Metro area.

Govconnection, which is one of our vendors, quite often has no pictures on their products, and minimal descriptions. Ordering the wrong thing because two products had a similar name would be a real possibility.

Have you ever written C code which uses a switch statement based on what type a struct/union is and calling the relevant code for it?

No. When I use structures as objects (which is often), they almost always contain a pointer to a block of general methods appropriate to that structure, as well as containing any methods unique to the object, all of which are called through the object/structure, so it would be unusual, at least, to be testing the object type in order to choose an object-specific procedure to call. However, I do mark each object type with a specific ID and serial as they are created, along with a tag indicating what procedure created them, as these things facilitate some very useful memory management and diagnostic mechanisms.

Have you ever used qsort?

I am aware of qsort. But I have my own multi-method sort library that I use. Most of them locate the comparison mechanisms they are to use through the procedures specified by the objects they are asked to sort. Likewise list management, memory management, certain types of drawing primitives and image processing primitives, image handling mechanisms, associative storage, basically anything I have run into that I thought likely I would need more than once. I am positively locked into the idea that if I write it, I can fix it, and the number of bugs and problems that fall into the "maybe they'll fix the library someday" class are greatly reduced. I'm a little less picky if I have the source code to a capability I didn't actually write and can supply my own version if and as needed. A good example of something like that is SQLite. Actually having the source code and compiling it in reduces my inherent paranoia to a somewhat duller roar.

Ha. Funny. Thank you, didn't know that.