Not until you take off your rose-colored glasses and look at the real world for a change!

We should be so lucky as to live in a world where something like the YLIP really existed, even with all the conflict and problems in The Diamond Age.. but we don't live in that world. We live in a world where it would just blather on about nonsense, meanwhile everything the little girls say will be analyzed by market researchers for better ways to profit from them, and likely have Barbie say things to indoctrinate little girls into being 'better consumers' (read as: PESTER MOM AND DAD TO BUY YOU MORE STUFF) and for all we know brainwash them into being who-knows-what. Then there's the possibility of someone hacking into them and making Barbie say obscene things or things intended to mislead little girls into doing something horribly, horribly wrong, or who knows what. The hell with shit like this, make it go away. It's not the technology that's bad, it's the fact that you can't trust corporations or anyone else with it these days. In fact let's get rid of Barbie entirely, it's a shitty concept that's at the root of all sort of malodorous crap concerning little girls and their development anyway.

Just put a piece of electrical tape over the goddamned thing if and when you have to rent a car from them and forget about it.

This, amplified by a factor of one million. Why are any of you still using Failbook!? Do you enjoy pain? Do you like being treated like children or inmates?

I don't think 'weak, irrational' or 'nonsense' really captures the flavor of the statement, so if you'll please allow me to indulge myself, I'll take a stab at it:

How about: 'Irrational'?

Unless the genetic sciences have reached a point where we're able to build the genetic code one piece at a time for an organism the size of a horse, and considering that this is a 'clone' we're talking about (i.e., a perfect copy of a previous, 'natural-born' horse), then the animal in question is, indeed 'a quarter-horse', and and the aforementioned quote is, in fact completely irrational, inaccurate, and furthermore reeks of extreme butthurt. It's not like you can turn the poor animal upside down and find 'Made in {insert Asian country-of-origin}' stamped on it somewhere, if you get my drift, and they've misspelled the name 'quarter-horse' somehow, to avoid violating someone's copyright, it is in fact a quarter-horse and genetically indistinguishable from any other animal of it's particular breed. Would they get so pissy about it if it was an identical twin of another horse (does that happen with horses?)

How do any of us know what is happening at the FAA behind closed doors? Do people expect them to have a Twitter account and tweet every little thing they're doing?

At what altitude will these operate? What is their operational ceiling? What safeguards against hacking/hijacking of their navigational systems will be in place? How resistant will they be to atmospheric conditions knocking them out of position? Will they have onboard redundant systems to protect against system faults causing them to move out of their designated position? I assume they're going to use GPS; how resistant to GPS hacking, being one avenue by which these drones may be hijacked, will they be? Will they be completely autonomous, in either station-keeping mode or in general navigation mode, or will there be remote human operators on duty 24/7 monitoring their operation?

These are just some questions off the top of my head that I'd imagine the FAA would be asking about such a device. Being smarter guys than I am I'll assume they'd have even more questions. I have no idea how large these drones would be, but if something so small as a duck could completely destroy a jet engine, then I'm certain that one of these drones could do just as well to take an aircraft down; any such device as these could, in the wrong hands, be used as a weapon of terror; that is what the FAA is considering. Of course this is just considering the possibilities of navigational hazard, I'm not even addressing the possibility of hijacking the wireless payload on these drones for hacking purposes. There are a million-and-one things that could go wrong (or be made to go wrong), and it's the job of the FAA (and planners and engineers at Google) to consider all the possibilities, even the small and unlikely ones, perform a threat evaluation on them, and plan/design/program accordingly. If you're just making a toy to play with then of course it's very simple but they're not therefore the job becomes large and complex and there is much responsibility on the shoulders of everyone involved with it.

I just moved into a new place, and having bought one Cree 100-watt equivalent lamp to try, decided I liked it and installed them in every fixture in the place. No funny colors (I prefer daylight color temp, and no excessive blueness to them either BTW) no flickering, no waste heat to speak of; what's not to like? I even installed 4-foot white LED shop lights in the garage, they're awesome, and will probably still be working 20 years from now. Anyway: The Cree bulbs I bought have no funny light patterns, are the same form-factor as an incandescent, and weren't terribly expensive, especially considering how long they should last. The bulbs in this article, on the other hand, look like a gimmick, and the tear-down looks to me like the 'power supply' is just a simple bridge rectifier and filter cap, so I'd doubt the lifespan of these units compared to something with a better power supply. In short: How is this 'story' anything other than marketing hype? These don't really offer anything new or interesting, just a cheap gimmick aimed at people still clinging to the idea of incandescent bulbs.

Possibly. Also, it would be nice if it was the beginning of the end for over-priced pharmaceuticals.

I think I saw some research somewhere showing that the same people who believed this also bought thousand dollar specialty speaker cables, HDMI cables, and specially crafted wooden volume control knobs for their home stereos, 'because it improves sound quality'.

I don't think you get the reference; did you ever see the show we're talking about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That all sounds completely rediculous. If you follow that thinking then we'd better never do anything to 'disturb the natural order and beauty of the asteroid belt', and for that matter I guess we're being completely irresponsible, wasteful, and littering of the galaxy by allowing space probes like Voyager to wander around loose, right?

I dunno about that, friend, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain aren't looking too fit and healthy these days for a trip to the Moon. I'll go along with the idea, though, so long as no fucktard politician decides that the Moon is a good place to start storing nuclear waste.

Have you seen how much of a shit-fit environmentalists throw when anyone wants to mine anything on this planet anymore? Nobody should have any qualms about mining anything on the Moon since it has no ecosphere to start with. Of course there's the question of it being economical to do so..

..I think the real question on everyone's mind concerning Earth's moon is: Will the film adaptation of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress be good or bad?

In all seriousness: I think this is a positive first step towards humans going back to the moon. We really need to build a permanent base/colony there. Hey, Elon! Want to spearhead this one?