"Do people have a right to shoot a home invader? Of course."

That actually varies by state. Not all consider trespass a crime worthy of execution

It would be easy enough to introduce anti-drone defenses. Nothing too fancy is needed: A simple net, thin as thread, strung from fencetop to poles or nearby buildings. Small drones bounce off, large ones get their blades entangled. Free drone!

This thing isn't going to get 1G. No known power source could provide enough power-to-weight ratio sustained, and even if one could the engine would melt in seconds. Forget even 0.1m/s/s, and think thrusts measured in milinewtons.

Bad example. Light does exert radiation pressure, yes - but it is far, far too weak to drive a radiometer. The spinning radiometer isn't due to radiation pressure. It's a more mundane effect: Imperfect vacuum. The black side is warmed more than the white, which heats up adjacent air, which exerts higher pressure, causing the spin. It's just a plain old heat engine.

That works. It just means that your software is sub-optimal - a competitor that pays the license fee can use more up-to-date techniques. It also requires constant legal vigilance - someone has to monitor any submitted code to make sure some programmer hasn't made use of a modern method without thought to the legal implications.

The codec only specifies how the encoded stream is formed and how it should be decoded. It does not specify how the encoder should transform raw video into encoded form, and much effort is devoted to finding new algorithms by which existing codecs may be made to perform better without alteration of the decoding side.

You're not the first to be confused by the coincidence in terms.

That doesn't quite work - the patents also cover useful encoding techniques, so you have to also go through your code and make sure you aren't using any mathematical concepts discovered and patented in the last twenty years.

MS did try to kill MP3 - they bundled Windows with a CD-ripping capability in windows media player that was only capable of saving to WMA format. It's a powerful tactic, but in this case it failed.

But when you're designing your codec with one hand tied behind your back, it's not going to work as efficiently.

Graphics is a patent minefield - it's one of the most legally aggressive areas in computing. Both parties have a strong commercial incentive to keep their technology secret - both to stop their rival stealing ideas, and to avoid inadvertently revealing any code that infringes upon a patent they were not aware of at the time. This slows down open-source development as every change needs to be examined by legal experts, and most legal experts are very cautious in their advice.

They also told me how much I should be offering for junk components in Eve if I was still to turn a profit on reprocessing. I've not played the game for years, but spreadsheets are a pretty important tool. They also tell you which ore is most profitable to mine.

The general rule I use is to divide mbps by ten to get MBps, rather than 8. The slight over-division compensates for various overheads - headers, dropped packets, etc.

It'd be better if we weren't stuck on such tiny MTUs still, but backwards compatibility demands it: Anything over 1500 bytes is probably going to run into an ethernet segment somewhere and go wrong.

It'd have to be quite an assassin too - the president is very well-protected. He can't leave home without a security team going ahead and securing every building with a window that overlooks his route, and he only travels any significant distance in vehicles designed to withstand a small missile. The JFK days of open-topped limos are past. I'm not sure quite how it could be done without access to some serious military hardware.

It'll be easier in a few years, when drones get smaller. You couldn't get a drone in close yet, but get them down to insect-sized and you can try fitting a ricin-tipped needle on one. It'd still be difficult even with that type of technology - you'd need to smuggle it through security at an event you knew he'd be attending, and try to stay unnoticed long enough to pilot it in from your smartphone... and I expect that once that tech becomes available, every area the president enters will also be screened off behind a mosquito net precisely to prevent such an attack.

I picked that site because they have a fairly rabid comment community, but not so fringe as to be completely isolated. WND is largely responsible for the Birther conspiracy theory - they started it, they worked tirelessly to promote it. Their stories are also frequently linked to from 'mainstream' right-wing news sites like OneNewsNow. They can't just be dismissed as some nutjob circle-jerk on a blog, they are still connected into the wider right-wing political community and can syndicate some columnists with real name recognition. They even have Chuck Norris writing for them.

ONN is a lot stricter with their comments though: If you threaten to shoot police officers there, moderators are likely to pull the comment after a short time. With WND it's pretty much anything-goes, so long as you don't actually say anything positive about Obama - those comments get moderated out quickly enough.