The drone delivery thing seems like a proxy for the fact that the regular postal system desperately needs a revamp to include more standardization. Basically, we need some system which acknowledges that parcel and package delivery is an increasingly important part of the process, and we want to receive things unattended.

You can only sometimes get this now.

If we had a system where we standardized mailbox sizes to some specification, and then licensed out some NFC/smart card system to let postal workers/delivery companies open them, then we might be getting somewhere. Sure, it's not perfect and it wouldn't be everywhere at once, but if you could simply buy the relevant thing at Home Depot and then delivery companies could be expected to use it, it'd be progress. Then the free-market innovates from there: various multi-tiered security products or the like.

The various flight ceilings on commercial aviation might speak to that, but I seriously doubt any court is going to interpret the law as being about property rights as opposed to public safety / nuisance.

You have all sorts of protections from things that never touch your property, but they're definitely not defined by the property boundaries. For instance you can't demand that soundwaves do not enter your premises at all - instead you can possibly get a neighbours air conditioner moved so it isn't above a certain volume, within the bounds of what's considered reasonable.

So I guess we shouldn't worry about Ebola either coz you don't think you'll ever get it either? Check your hipster-holier-then-thou-attitude at the door mate.

Influenza infects hundreds of millions of people every year, but kills only a tiny fraction of them. To die of influenza you need to have complicating conditions. The type you had are curable with drugs we already have. The type which aren't are the type of lifestyle or age related issues which are a problem no matter who gets them, and regardless of whether you get the flu.

A virus for which we also have a vaccine.

By every measure, influenza is not scary. People who get it do not expect to die of it. But we're also going to be able to bugger-all to stop it being a yearly global epidemic. Which is fortunate, because again, it's very hard to die of it.

Start by letting them turn off the cameras with discretion. If they wind up not recording during notable incidents, that's going to play badly against them in court.

There's no reason to let best the enemy of better here.

Dying the flu generally requires complicating conditions. Most people survive it just fine. Ebola is scary because most people don't survive it.

So has the genetic code of numerous pathogens. That doesn't make them easily created. For a simple example, we currently have an entire field dedicated to bottom-up synthetic life creation (start with a DNA sequence, and bootstrap a cell). That's a hot field, which has required thousands of man-hours to understand.

Terrorists in field laboratories without proper equipment are not going to be accomplishing it. It is a huge expensive project.

Smallpox is not "easily created".

Right: so still, think about those numbers. 30% of India's population is over 100% of the US in terms of sheer number of people. So a low-end phone is exactly the right device to target there.

The indian market is 1 billion people, most in some state of poverty. You can "do well" there, by western standards, without touching more then a tiny fraction of it. Apple don't have 100% of the US population as a market, and don't have 100% of the market. In India, if both those things were true, it would only represent about 30% of the total population.

I'd be un-surprised when it leads a half-dozen "gotcha" worded follow ups from someone who clearly has no interest in Googling their own ideas first.

Desynchronized pumping action would be a problem I imagine. Our heart valves aren't really designed to cope with more then the one.

I think the fear people have with binary logs is that, if you get corruption, a human feels like they have a hope of decoding what the text was supposed to mean.

Although I think this is pretty naive - people thinking "dropped characters", as opposed to the more usual "50 consecutive messages disappeared". A binary format with proper message boundaries is exactly as robust as a text file in that capacity.

Upstart was in no way complicated, and writing upstart scripts was a breeze.

Run blah every X seconds is just about the dumbest way we can be doing things on a computer. It's a closed system. It can know exactly when a process dies, and handle the event then. The inability to do this is a huge flaw.

Write non-buggy software. Hope you have the millions per line of code they paid the space shuttle team.