Huh. My 2000 GMC 3/4 ton pickup would like to run you over. Still runs fine, only mild rust despite spending 14 years in a 'precipitating marine environment. Yep, it's had various bits replaced but that's how a piece of equipment runs for 20 years.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

The iPhone 6+ is in fact less bendable than the Samsung phones, and the Samsung phones have screens that will shatter instead of bending slightly...

But in fact the iPhone 6+ is easily good for more than a day of charge. So if you want an iPhone that you don't have to think about the battery, they already sell one.

AirBnB will reimburse up to $50k in loss or damage from a guest. Read that in a recent article about AirBnB...

But you mitigate that as a host by not taking every single offer that comes along.

Give me $2500 dollars and I will send you a nice breakfast.

At least in the US, public nudity should be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention, the Smoot-Hawley Act, general concepts of decency and a Crime Against Nature.

There is a reason that cultures uniformly (pun intended, I suppose) develop social norms that include clothing.

This might not have been a 'five pound drone'. The most annoying part of the reporting on this incident has been a lack of clear description of what sort of device it actually was. According to the Ars article it was flying 800+ feet above ground at an altitude of 11,000 feet above sea level. That implies a class of UAV more sophisticated that the $1000 Phantoms. TFA implied that this was a professional class drone which could have weighed in the 10 kg range.

That sort of object hurts when you ingest them.

Except that most of the forest fires happen on Federal land. Especially in the western US, the Federal government owns huge tracts of land. If you don't do anything then you are liable for damages when problems on your property start interfering with others. The government does have some immunity to suits like this but has been successfully sued for damages caused by forest fires.

People are starting to think along your lines but old bad habits die hard, especially when you have to pay for them yourself.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

(Flooded area...Jetpack Guy flies in near house with a family of 4 on top of it, as the flood waters rise...)

Jetpack guy sees problem, calls in real helicopter.....

All of your scenarios imply that Mr. Jetpack has to save the day by him / her self. Real rescues are a team sport.

That said, it isn't a compelling sort of thing to own. Expensive, likely cranky of maintenance and training. Limited range. More useful to get a bunch of cheap drones and running around looking for people to help.

No, it just means that Skynet is more patient than you are.

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.