You're probably right, but I think this does have "regular people" implications beyond paparazzi and government spying.

For instance, I imagine most of us have heard about the repeated issues with anti-hunting activists flying UAV's over a hunt club property to record people hunting. At least four times, hunters have just shot the thing down. The activists complain that the hunters shouldn't be able to damage their uav, where the hunters complain that outside parties shouldn't be harassing people engaging in a legal activity on private property. It's obvious to me that this is the kind of extreme assholery that (perhaps prematurely) forces us to consider what should and shouldn't be ok.

http://www.suasnews.com/2012/11/19719/activists-drone-shot-out-of-the-sky-for-fourth-time/

As someone with a passing interest in hobby UAV's, I don't want to see this kind of thing turn into a government-only, legal nightmare. As a human being, I don't want people being assholes with this technology, as it has gotten ridiculously easy to operate and very inexpensive. Any jamoke can own and operate a quadcopter with an HD camera.

I don't agree or disagree with Schmidt, but while I don't share his specific personal concerns, it's something that's going to have to be dealt with, somehow.

I hear you, and that's a fair point. But at the same, I think "edge of space" works well enough. We all know what altitudes they're talking about in weather balloon projects.

As far as the general public is concerned, when you're up high enough that you see inky black sky above and you're obviously looking way, way down at the planet... that's close enough for a blurb to use "edge of space", if only as very vague altitude reference.

Those of us that care will look at the listed altitude, and we're familiar enough with these projects to know they're not talking about a more textbook definition. Right?

There's a pretty obvious element the gp is ignoring here, as well. Hobby weather balloon projects couldn't possibly account for more than the very tiniest fraction of waste plastic that ends up in the ocean in the first place. There are very few of them, most of them fall on dry ground, and a fair percentage of those are probably recovered since that's a primary goal in these projects (you want your footage, flight data, etc).

I'm all for being careful about where things go, but in these cases I think we'd have to be more concerned about a popped balloon and cooler falling on moving traffic. I can't think of any way this ends up being a serious threat to marine life.

Last I read the British have better dental hygiene than us Americans do. They're just not as fixated on the bleaching and such.

And before some horse's ass drags out the new "i'm confused by your 'americans' reference", I meant the US.

Hm. I'd imagine the conditions for culturing the related bacteria are pretty specific to a living host. The chemistry of the mouth, eating food, temperature, enclosed cavity (flesh of your face), etc.

He did a fair bit of research for a hobby project. He used someone else's published results on the performance of the radio equipment.

He also had to test the effects of temperature on the servos, and determined he had to remove most of the grease, as that's the part that locks up at lower temperatures.

He tested the line cutting method (resistor and match head) on a previous project of his, that was good fun... a quadcopter shooting balloons like a video game.

He's done quite a lot of work with all the other stuff from his other FPV video projects. He's done a lot of really interesting stuff and knows what he's doing, so he wasn't just gluing a bunch of rc plane parts together and crossing his fingers.

Ahem.

It looks like Rackspace made, and open sourced, the test suite.

I'm sure that's exactly the situation... there's only enough money in doing the job if the customer is willing to pay through the nose to have something done and in their hands right now.

You'd think these local shops would fill the queue with nearly competitive options with long turn-around... but they don't seem interested in doing that. I assume there's just no margin in it.

It makes me wonder why this still works for companies like Apple.

Meanwhile, I price out a few PCB's at four shops, all ten minutes from me in one of the largest industrial parks in the US. It's nearly ten times more expensive to order them from next door, even if I drove over there and picked them up. I mean, that includes the cost for the Chinese to pack them, put them on a cargo ship traveling across the pacific, and delivery from the west coast to the midwest by air, truck, and foot.

I understand that things are very different in large quantities, but it sure doesn't seem like manufacturing is going to come back here any time soon.

Oh god, those things you did to GeoCities and MySpace... you owe us all an apology!

I don't think he meant the Google software must be exclusive, just that they must be included if you want to add Play.

Which is good, because AT&T puts their shitty navigation, shitty messaging software, etc. on their android devices. Samsung puts their shitty email software, contact crap, etc. on the devices too. All of these try to duplicate the much better functionality of Google's apps.

And if they could, you know companies like AT&T would get rid of the Google alternatives and make you use their trash. As it is they make it so you can't remove the AT&T junk. So thank god Google makes that stuff a package deal.

So have our cars. Now we rely on the ridiculous capabilities and crazy-effective safety mechanisms built into them.

This manifests as everyone driving like a fucking moron.

You don't have to qualify your impressions like you did... that's pretty much what everyone would say in IT department too. Verbatim.

You might be right. I hope not though.

I mean, I couldn't explain net neutrality to my parents or friends and have them get it, but I could say, "do you want Comcast charging you $20 a month just to use the Netflix you already pay for over the internet connection you already pay for?" They sure as hell understand that argument. And the blackouts did get peoples' attention.

In this case, much as it was with net neutrality, businesses look at patent trolls as a miserable pain in the ass, keeping everyone from doing what they do. Even many of the companies with huge patent portfolios acquire them as defensive holdings rather than weapons of mass litigation. They have them because it's easier to buy paper on the cheap, rather than fight every single I.P. chop shop on earth.

I'm not trying to get all political with "markets cure all", but do witness this exact story. Many businesses that are trying to do their thing hate this shit too, just like small ones. That could help.