Thanks! I'm getting ready to post chapter thirty in a minute. I screwed up in this post, though, I forgot I already posted the chapter where Knolls finds that Green is Destiny's dad.

You are absolutely correct but they know perfectly well it would just be followed up with the obvious and very specific request for "All e-mails from Edward Snowden with subject matter relating to the legality of the internet monitoring and cellular meta data gathering activities conducted by the NSA".

And then they'd be right back here were they are now. Having to make the same excuse, which might have some legitimacy as those mails probably are evidence in an on going criminal investigation of Snowden; all though we all know he isn't returning to the States without some kind of immunity agreement so its rather hollow sounding. Think how hollow it would sound if it was a second excuse given.

The reality is Snowden's story about having attempted to raise the issues thru the proper channels is likely truthful and would just expose more NSA and State Department lies. The would rather just look like dicks and someone felt just shutting down the FOIA avenue would look less Dickish than being evasive.

No I think we should require a license if you are a commercial operator. If you are just flying for fun than you should not need a license. I don't think the number of aircraft that will be operated by pure hobbiests is going to be large enough to present a public nuisance.

I do think the totality of drones in the air will. So licensing commercial operators makes sense. If you fly as a hobbyist and your drone crashes causing damage or injury its a civil matter between you and injured party. If you are an unlicensed commercial operator you should face additional penalties.

I know its a fun conspiracy theory and all but I don't think the double standard is deliberate, even if it does exist.

The real-estate lobby is probably only slightly less powerful than the Hollywood lobby. I mean lets see:

There are huge tax advantages for income properties, in terms of you can take losses against capital gains on them, but you can't on a property you used as a residence? Why?

The mortgage interest tax deduction -- exists almost exclusively to increase borrowing power and willingness, which DOES NOT really help buyers and owners, it just pushes values up in general which means banks get more interest realtors and title companies get bigger commissions.

There was never any real financial reform done; and if look into the debate carefully you can't count that all up to GOP obstructionism non of the proposals from the left did much to address predatory lending or liar loans/documentation requirements.

Given how much Gall Street has tied up in it the only thing more untouchable to regulators than Hollywood might be Real-Estate.

I am usually a pretty big skeptic when it comes to regulation but I gotta agree with you here.

This seems like a federal agency operating well withing the boundaries of what it was established to do. I also think we do need some management of [commercial] drones, do to the sheer numbers and the fact that most operators are flying over other peoples properties, where crashes could cause damage or injury.

People doing purely as a hobby problem I would be more skeptical of the need to regulate them. There numbers are few enough and lets be honest most of the air craft they would be operating will remain small and light; we can probably expect incidents form their use to be infrequent enough and small enough in severity to sort out in our local small claims courts at least until that proves not to be the case.

The real-estate folks though are using the drones commercial and if we let every real-estate agent, grounds keep, delivery boy, paper boy, etc; fly a drone with no management whatsoever that is hell of lot of drones in air! Some of those crafts might start getting bigger and heavier pretty quickly as well.

I would think it would be a matter of how much contrast this thing needs to "see" the counter obvious counter measure would be to "light up" areas where a someone is likely to be a target with light of the same wavelength but from an omnidirectional source. So the bullet can see the spot the laser is painting against the background.

Should be fairly easy for situations like the inside of a car an important person travels in, and the outside of residences and office buildings and such. Now if you are the impoverished kid that is harder to do.

Yet don't you dare encrypt anything in an amateur radio band!

I have been posted before there is simply no way the NSA could have use for even the most conservative estimates for there storage capacity in that Utah data center unless they are or were planning to keep the content.

Pretty much this. If your company is big enough or drives enough revenue from its IT systems that require routine off hours maintenance they should staff for that.

That is not say that if its just Patch Tuesdays they need to; or the occasional rare major internal code deployment that happens a couple time a year or so. For that you as the admin should suck it up, and roll out of bed early once and while. Hopefully your bosses are nice and let you have some flextime for it. Knock out at 3p on Fridays those weeks or something.

If there is a regular maintenance window that is frequently used, say at least twice a week, then they need to make the regular scheduled working hours for some employee(s). Maybe some junior admin who can follow deployment instructions works 3a-10a Tuesdays and Wednesdays; but lets be fair to that person they have a life outside of work a deserve to have a predictable schedule. They should still work those hours even if there is nothing going on that week, and just use the time do whatever else they do; update documentation; test out new software versions etc, inventory, etc.