Keep in mind these are asians we're talking about, and according to their action movies and cartoons, they have about 10 gallons of blood stored under high pressure :-P

In a place as corrupt as the US, you shouldn't trust anyone or anything.

Yes, this is a common set of mistakes and misunderstandings as well as the bizarre focus on grant money over the money in the entire fossil fuel industry that the average climate denialist partakes in.

Then you really won't like legal media which includes DRM which will make the user experience vastly more frustrating than it would be for a pirate, and/or online authentication servers that usually go down at some point in the future, rendering your purchase useless.

When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well.

Yes, for normal people, but we're nerds. We'll simply hack them, just like we jailbreak iPhones.

This story reminds me of something that happened in a bar a year or so ago. A fellow had a strange looking contraption that looked like it had something to do with a furnace. I asked him what it was, and he said it was an "obsolete" analog part that cost him twenty bucks new that he was installing in a friend's furnace to replace a burned up digital board that cost $200 used.

Look at cars, my last car had a digital circuit to control climate. If it had gone out, the replacement was $300. $300 for something that surely cost the automaker less than $5 to manufacture.

If I'm forced to buy an internet-connected toaster, you can bet its antennas will be the first parts to be removed.

A lot of reasons. I probably don't have a fixed IP address, I'd have to keep on top of security far more closely than with a PC, and I'd have to have at least two computers running 24/7/365 in case one went down, and I usually only have one or two running when I'm awake. The electricity alone would cost more than hosting.

Your equipment will now have 57% brighter indicator LEDs on the front to burn your retinas at night!

That sounds like a challenge :-P

But seriously they're not Americans so they're not going to fill any object that could be a fun target with holes just because they can get away with it.

Yep in these parts, most of the rich have government "connections."

Recently had a similar incident with illegally imported cars. Quickly forgotten about. People kept cars illegally discounted by a greater amount than an average Joe's annual salary around here.

My dad works for a guy who isn't *physically* hiding anything on his property, but has hidden all the money spent to build it in a hilarious shell game. And yes he has government "connections." And a sweet little guest house for his motorcycle.

You can view the age of an image and see images from different times using the full Google Earth client app.

Because it's going to be less than the weight of a large candy bar. 12km is a very long flight for a quadcopter. I'm surprised they didn't use a fixed-wing aircraft. It would be harder to automate but one RC pilot's salary isn't a bad price to pay for this publicity stunt.

It's time to measure SPACE DICKS again!

Nope can't find any evidence that iPhones ship with a full bash install, but they do have the capability to run some bash commands.