Technologies existed to prevent Fukushima and Chernobyl decades before they actually happened. They weren't used. Why ? Cost.

Technologies exist to make solar panel mfr clean - but we buy them from China where it isn't used, Why ? Cost.

Same with wind in fact - older broken turbines are left to rot and pollute the landscape, why ? Cost. Costs too much to fix them it's uneconomic, because they generate so little. So why are we building new ones ? Cost - or rather subsidy.

Wind takes 100+ sq miles to produce the same as one nuclear plant (1 sq mile) - and infrasound issues are still not well understood, but talk to affected people and it appears you are making most of that 100+ sq miles uninhabitable by humans. Infrasound effect on wildlife is unknown - maybe the critters don't get ill like people do, or maybe we'll just pretend it's not a problem by doing no research on it so there is no scientific information that it is bad...

Or maybe we'll put the wind generation offshore instead at several times the cost (er. subsidy), and pretend that all the subsea construction etc. does no damage to the marine environment. And when the offshore turbines die, we'll remove them cleanly using the money from the decommissioning fund we made the developers set up in the first place. Or maybe our kids will just have to pay for that (like nuclear).

Whatever you do, there is a financial cost and an environmental one, and a trade off between the two. And if anything is consistent across all the energy generation methods, it's that we pay less to do it dirtier.

TANSTAAFL. Coal and oil are pretty good at rendering large areas uninhabitable. Water (tidal and hydro) is pretty good at major ecosystem change and rendering areas uninhabitable. Wind and solar might look like ok in the area of _deployment_, but if you look at the manufacturing... [ok, I'll save you googling it, here's one that took me all of 30secs to find: http://www.worldwatch.org/node... ]

Does depend a little bit on which books you count as recorded history vs. fiction, and how you interpret the descriptions. E.g. "fire and sulphur rained from heaven" could be volcano - unless you believe the writers' culture would have known what a volcano was and would have said "from the mountain".

I believe OneNote is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Win Phone, and Linux if installed the right way: https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...

Not really tying you to one OS. Plus you can export in open formats - PDF, XPS and HTML at least.

Linking and embedding are different techniques with pros and cons, something like OneNote allows you to use either (or both) as appropriate rather than be tied down to a specific one. Guess you probably never, ever, move, rename, or edit your referenced files, and never want to put annotations over your referenced image, and never need to search your notes including the not-embedded references (or are happy to open up each reference and search it separately). For other users who do have some of those requirements, text files won't cut it.

Immutability and retention are an issue with all digital information outside a properly configured and standards-compliant electronic records system - and even then there are limitations.

OneNote can get close enough for most purposes however - it can be configured to auto-backup to any location at configurable time intervals. Use file-history, time-machine, rsync, etc. from there. Zip, digital-sign and timestamp the backups and store in your records management system or file directly with multiple sets of lawyers around the world. Once your backups grow to significant size, realise you needed a retention and disposal policy and mechanism...

Also, be aware that nothing is perfect - permanency of paper stores is often overestimated. Anything that is ever referred to (and if not, why are you keeping it?) needs a checkout/checkin/refile process all of which involves risk of loss. Temperature, humidity, mold, vermin, can all bite you badly, before you even get to the more obvious ones of the single cigarette-end or burst water pipe.

Yup. Fact that no money changes does not help you.

Your local tax collector just luuuuuves it when you barter or trade favours - because you almost certainly won't declare it properly as income (which they will decide it is, at some value they decide). That means that whenever they want you, they have something to hang you with.

Also, you are unlikely to avoid other regulations. My wife used to swap childcare with a friend - turns out that's illegal here in UK unless you are both registered childminders (plenty of hoops to jump through, and costs). It hit national news when they threatened to prosecute two policewomen who were swapping childcare.

Yup, not only that, but on CIA territory:

So, you go visit the CIA, you sit down at a CIA computer, and you expect they are not monitoring its use ? I wouldn't expect that when going to any client site let alone a f***ing intelligence agency.

What next ? She going to complain that the CIA computer also intercepted messages sent to someone in the Ecuadorian embassy in London ?

And that one's BS too - their non-regulation specifically refers to the operating / flying of model aircraft, not the modeling part (i.e. the building of them, flying or static).

Their argument seems to be that:

1. model aircraft are not mentioned in the FARs, therefore they are not regulated
2. we issued a note to make that clear, with some voluntary guidelines
3. the guidelines / note didn't mention commercial use (or otherwise) - therefore commercial use was not covered by it
4. because commercial use was not mentioned we must have intended to regulate it under the FARs which don't mention it either, so actually we must have intended to ban it all along
5. operators should have known all along that it was banned even though it wasn't ever mentioned in any of the rules as being banned, because clearly not being mentioned as allowed means that it's banned, unless it's not commercial in which case not being mentioned means it is not regulated at all
6. oh and by the way, we've never defined (since we've never mentioned in any rules) commercial / non-commercial flight w.r.t. model aircraft - just be aware that one is banned and one isn't and we'll fine you if you do the banned one

His court filing is online (and linked from elsewhere in the thread) - it makes clear that he did in fact coordinate with them. http://www.wired.com/images_bl...

You need to comply with the regulation - FAR101 applies to model rockets and determines what permits you would need etc. - your back yard needs to be quite large.

In contrast, there is no regulation (FAR) that applies to model aircraft, and never has been.

If the alleged recklessness was the issue, then there would be no reason to consider the commercial nature (or not) of the flight - it's either reckless use of a model aircraft or it isn't. Since there are no FARs covering model aircraft, that would be a police matter.

The reason the FAA says the flight is commercial is that they have said that commercial use of model aircraft is not covered by the previous guidance (which was only voluntary anyway and doesn't in fact mention that it does not apply to commercial use), and that because it is not covered by the guidance it must therefore be in fact banned (despite previously saying that model aircraft use was unregulated) - or more strictly that it must be subject to standard aircraft regulations which would be impossible to comply with in a model aircraft (the pilot must be strapped in... etc.). They've tried to institute this effective ban using a policy statement (effectively saying "we never regulated this before, but we never mentioned commercial use before and actually didn't intend to not-regulate commercial use") - and the judge has decided that they cannot make rules that way by the back door circumventing federal procedures. They didn't just "not follow" the rule making process - they never made any rules at all.

The guy doesn't wiggle out on a technicality, he simply didn't break any (FAA) rules, because the FAA hasn't made any that cover model aircraft. The FAA could get off their backside and actually make some rules and regulations to govern model aircraft - but they haven't.

The funniest bit is that if the pilot _was_ subject to FARs (if he'd been flying _in_ a full sized aircraft), then FAA is in breach of its own procedures again - because as he is a foreign national, the FAA are supposed to refer the pilot to his own aviation authority for enforcement / punishment.

Then address it under the laws about being reckless with a model aircraft, or being reckless with any other type of potential weapon - which is something the police would deal with (and I think have in past cases, e.g. where RC helicopter killed someone in NY).

The FAA tried to prosecute the guy for not having a licence, because (they claimed) it was a commercial flight. This would have massive implications for model a/c flyers who would all require pilots licences. It was a huge attempted land-grab (or simply laziness on the part of the prosecutor not wanting to collect the evidence to charge him with assault or whatever, so we'll just nail him with this licence thing) and the judge saw through it.

It's like a parent on the school run (allegedly) runs a few red lights and drives on the sidewalk, so the city decides to prosecute them for not having a taxi licence because they were giving a lift to another child.

    "but if we accept this, it means that every parent who ever gives a lift to another child would need a taxi licence"
    "no, that's not the point - the city has a responsibility for taxi safety, if this parent was reckless with their car, regardless of type, it needs to be addressed"

It is the point - address the recklessness, not the lack of a licence that was never needed in the first place (and a licence which, as far as I can see the FAA doesn't actually issue, yet - only experimental/non-commercial approvals - in other words they were prosecuting him for not having a licence that he couldn't possibly get).

Also, the FAA claim that the original guidance for model aircraft (ac91-57) excludes commercial use - love to see someone quote where it does, as the word "commercial" does not appear in it, at all. They are probably trying to argue that being a "model aircraft" necessarily means being non-commercial but that is ridiculous as it would always have been possible to e.g. hire/rent a model aircraft for money, which would be a commercial. Even a model shop demoing an RC a/c for sale would be commercial.

Problem is, it will be broken, soon. And after April, it won't be fixed. Ever.

It is very very very likely that some people are hoarding zero-day vulns against XP to use only after that date.

At least one known arrest and conviction, and conviction confirmed on appeal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Of course, that was cartoon based on the Simpsons characters, maybe that's a lot more realistic than your naked children in manga etc....

Well you can start your list now (and I know I am not the only one complaining). I think the price is now crazy - when you look at how hw / system costs have fallen the OS is now a ridiculous percentage of the price. MS upgrade pricing for 8 / 8.1 is also crazy (and getting worse) since they dropped the very early upgrade offers.

I quite like 8 - noticeably faster than 7 and having Hyper-V baked in makes running VMs on a laptop several times faster without the driver worries of trying to install server OS. I don't use the touch / metro stuff except on a touch device, where it's ok (but that's all), it's easy enough to ignore. The start screen is a lot faster and more flexible than the old start menu (particularly when you have a lot of stuff installed).

However, I have two machines fully licensed for 7 Pro that I will not upgrade to 8.1 - why ? Stupid price. I would really like consistency across the devices in the house, I would like 8/8.1 on those machines, but 8 Pro upgrade is silly money, and with 8.1 even the upgrade option is removed - now have to pay full retail price. Both machines are laptops and have maybe 2yrs life left (with luck), but for the price of 2 * 8.1 Pro I can buy a brand new machine with 8.1 Pro on it.

So operating system cost is now 50% (maybe more) of system cost (low end but perfectly usable basic system), and you have to pay that much again for every major version OS upgrade.

I really wish I'd bought some cheap 8 upgrade keys when they first had them on offer - I suspect a lot of people didn't buy because of the initial Win 8 reviews, but now will have a set of mixed 7 & 8 devices and would like to upgrade, but price is now the blocker. I think MS could move a significant number of 7 installations to 8.x if they repeated the initial upgrade pricing now - but if anything they seem to be set against upgrades (just as XP goes out of support... and they really want everyone to buy new kit).

Some of us can still recall when any Linux box could (and did) cause a packet storm if the subnet mask was not on a byte boundary.

Yes, but these days you can set up your test lab virtual and isolated (on pretty much and desktop or even laptop) - let the students do that themselves to learn. Not too many settings you'd have to check/lock to ensure network isolation. I haven't seen a physical test lab (for software testing) in years.