You may not need to, but the drones in this particular news story were active only when the planes were. So whoever was operating them probably didn't use the method you're proposing.

How do you automate the drones in such a way that they fly only when there are planes taking off or landing?

Me too, but the other applications (a composer and a mail/news client) are so unobtrusive that I don't even know they're there. Even with the extra applications, SeaMonkey ran much leaner and faster than Firefox did in its bloated days, and for all I know still runs leaner and faster.

Why bother with this when you could just use SeaMonkey, which is the successor to the original Mozilla Application Suite (which Firefox was spun off of) that largely retains the original, classic interface?

I don't use a smartphone and I can't seem to find a web interface for this new IGTV. (Instagram's press release says only that it is being rolled out on Android and iOS.) So I don't see how this can possibly compete with YouTube.

If they ever do roll out a web interface, then I hope the video controls will be better than what's offered on the main Instagram site. There you can only play or stop videos; there is no way to control the volume, jump to a different time index, or even get basic information about the video such as its length and title.

I'm not really sure what this has to do with my post. All I was trying to do was to double-check the OP's bandwidth calculations. I wasn't passing judgment one way or another on the practice of surreptitiously using this bandwidth.

Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier [finder.com] is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.

Let's do the math. State-of-the-art audio codecs, such as Opus, can intelligibly store speech using as little as 0.7 Kb/s. The perceived quality at such rates is terrible, but it may be good enough for the purpose of fuzzy matching to a known broadcast signal. And the device doesn't need to be recording all the time -- it needs to be recording only at or around the known broadcast times. So recording and transmitting a single two-hour game would require only 615 KB. A hundred megabytes is enough to transmit about 15 such games. I don't follow soccer so I have no idea whether or not that's a typical number of games for Spanish teams to play in a month.

ICQ is not still running -- at least, not the way it used to. When I log in to my account (which I had been using continuously since 1996 or 1997), I find that everything has been locked down. Trying to send messages to anyone results in the reply, "Your account has been compromised. Please proceed to the following link to unblock your account", followed by the URL of a form hosted on the ICQ website. The form offers to unlock the account upon receipt of a mobile phone number. Googling shows that this problem isn't unique to me; a lot of other people have reported the same problem. I've tried contacting ICQ support to insist that my account is not compromised, but the support reps who respond say the only way they will unlock the account is via SMS. I never give my phone number to IM/social networking companies and am not about to start now. The "Your account has been compromised" message is either a ruse to get everyone to hand over their personal details to ICQ, or else ICQ has suffered a massive, undisclosed data breach. Either way, I'm not using the service any more.

It's interesting how different cities take different approaches to free public transit. In Tallinn, public transit is free for locals but not for visitors, whereas in the Swiss city of Basel, it's free for visitors but not for locals. (The city government supplies transit passes to hotels, which then distribute them to their registered guests. Conveniently, visitors can still avail themselves of free travel while travelling to the hotel to check in: all they need to do is show the ticket inspector their reservation.)

I was a long-term user of KMail (since at least 2001) on my home computer. When KMail2 came out, I held off on upgrading because of several showstopping bugs I read about on the KDE Bugzilla. Years and years passed and these bugs didn't get fixed; meanwhile I was stuck using an increasingly antiquated operating system (openSUSE 11.4, from 2012) since all newer versions of it packaged only KMail2. Last year I finally broke down and upgraded the OS to the most recent version.

Predictably, KMail2 turned out to be a nightmare. Converting my old mail folders was fraught with problems. When I finally got that sorted out, I was bitten by the infamous message duplication bug wherein extra copies of messages would appear whenever the filters were run. None of the workarounds from the dozen or so bug reports worked for me. I had no choice but to switch to another mail client. Though I use Thunderbird at work, its filtering system is underpowered and buggy. Claws Mail seemed to be the only other option.

In KMail2, as in KMail, my mail was stored in maildir folders, so the easiest migration path to Claws Mail was to set up a local IMAP server -- Dovecot -- and copy over my maildir folders. I then set up an IMAP account in Claws Mail pointing at the local IMAP server.

I couldn't find any way of easily and accurately migrating my KMail(2) filters, so I manually recreated them all in Claws Mail. It took me a while to get the hang of Claws Mail's filters and actions.

The only thing that I haven't been able to migrate to my satisfaction is the address book. KMail2 gets the address book from KAddressbook, which uses vCards. But Claws Mail supports neither vCards nor CalDAV servers -- at least not very well. I did manage to export the KAddressbook entries and import them into Claws Mail, but almost all the fields other than the name and e-mail address were lost.

At this point, I'm waiting either for better vCard/CalDAV support in Claws Mail (in which case I'll consider my migration to Claws Mail complete), or for KMail2 to fix their mail duplication bug, in which case I might switch back to KMail2.

I don't use "apps" but there are recommender websites that allow you to rate books, movies, TV shows, etc., and then suggest similar ones you would enjoy on the basis of your similarity to other users.

For video, I think Criticker is very good. You rate films and TV shows you've seen on a scale of 0 to 100, and it then predicts your rating of unseen media (and fairly accurately, I must say). It also allows you to write capsule reviews, and to read those left by others. I find these really helpful when trying to choose between similarly ranked films. You can also filter recommendations by genre, country, year, etc.

For books, everyone seems to use Goodreads. I think its recommendation system is terrible, though it does feature community reviews which are pretty decent.

I've made scores of international trips in my life, for business and pleasure, and on only one occasion did the border guards demand access to my laptop. That was at Pyongyang International Airport in North Korea, in August of 2015. And at least the search was conducted in full view of myself -- they even asked me to do a lot of it myself, since they were completely unfamiliar with KDE and couldn't type on my Dvorak keyboard. It turns out all they were looking for were South Korean movies (which they didn't want me distributing to the locals), and as soon as it became obvious that I had none, they called off the search.

Why, despite becoming more and more irrelevant each day, do we see such a complete lack of action on the part of Mozilla?

One of Mozilla's greatest assets (far more so than other browser developers) is its user community. What are you doing to ensure their products' continued survival? Personally, I evangelize Thunderbird and SeaMonkey to my friends and coworkers, at least when my advice is solicited or would be otherwise welcome, and at work I make sure our wiki contains instructions on getting Thunderbird to work with the local Exchange (ugh) infrastructure. As far as I know this has converted quite a few users who would otherwise be using the Outlook Web Interface or Outlook in a Windows VM.

The article neglects to mention perhaps the most famous case of all, Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Senior. And that's just an abbreviation -- his actual surname (or so he claimed) was 666 letters long.