Yet you visited Slashdot long enough to not only click through to this article, but also post 7 comments.

For someone so keen on seeing the death of the web, you sure use it alot. Or when you said "Give everyone..." did you just mean "everyone else", because your rules don't apply to yourself?

In what way do you envision phones and tablets making the web go away? I browse the web on my tablet and phone much more than on my computer.

While it's true that I tend to click on the obtrusive ads much more than the low-key unobtrusive ones, that's only because I'm trying to click on the f'ing tiny little close button (which is even harder to hit on a tablet or phone). Then when I click on the add because I missed the close button by a pixel or two and the advertiser's page loads, I'm pissed off at whatever they are advertising, so I can't imagine that my click was worth paying for.

You mean more productive like popups from every website saying "Support our site! Now that all internet Advertising has been banned, you have to pay us 17 cents for every page you view".

All of the ads on the page should be loaded in parallel by your browser, unless it's some sort of weird ad within an ad.

You mean shifty shit like say right on their home page:

Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites

And they also provide a checkbox right on the main options page that controls whether to Allow some non-intrusive advertising.

From TFA:

Those ships will include an extra mechanical device to prevent pilots from inadvertently unlocking the tail sections, known as “the feather” early, Virgin Galactic wrote in a report obtained by Discovery News.

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

Yes there is. Though I don't need a smoke detector app on my phone to hear the smoke detector in my bedroom go off if my phone catches on fire at night.

Depends on the size of the fire. My phone could put out a match.

20kg is around 5 gallons of fire supression - even a home sprinkler head will discharge around 20 gpm, and you'll have more than one in a typical room. Set off a pair of those for 15 minutes and you've already got 600 gallons of water in the house.

A 1.5" handline can supply up to 200 gpm, so I figured it'd take at least 5 or 10 minutes to knock down the fire. This house fire took 75,000 gallons of water. When a nearby house was on fire, I saw 3 pairs firefighters each with a line (2 looked like maybe 1.5", the one they were spraying up through the roof was larger, maybe 2 or 2.5") spraying a constant stream of water for at least 10 minutes to douse the fire.

An 18 rotor aircraft designed to carry a person for up to 20 minutes is not really comparable with a 3 fan long endurance surveillance drone.

911: what's your emergency?
Homeowner: I called 30 minutes ago for a firetruck because of an electrical fire in my basement, where are they!?
911: Oh, we sent a drone to look at your house, it didn't see any fire from the air.
Homeowner: Well my basement is still full of smoke, and I can hear electrical arcing
911: Can you see smoke or flames from the outside of your house?
Homeowner: No, just the basement
911: Wait until the flames have burnt through the roof or walls of the house then give us a call and we'll send another drone. If we see a fire at that time, we'll refund the $99.99 "false alarm" fee from the first drone. Please make sure that you really see flames this time, as you only 3 false alarms before we stop sending out the drone. Those things are expensive to operate, you know.... maybe go down and try fanning the flames to see if you can really get the fire going you call us again.

Have any fire fighting experts claimed that you can reliably detect an early stage house fire with a drone? Will you be as inclined to take their word for it if you call in a fire, and the fire department says they couldn't see it from the air, so you must be lying about it?

Assuming you're talking about a house fire, unless the fire has burned through the roof, all a couple of kilos of fire suppression chemicals is going to do is stain the roof. And if the fire *has* burned through the roof, all it's going to do is piss off the fire -- it'll take thousands of gallons of water to suppress it at that point.

If someone calls in a fire or accident and the first department sends a drone first to see if the caller is lying, I forsee some big liability lawsuits if someone dies because the fire department was delayed by the time it takes to get a drone in the air and verify the fire. Or worse, if the drone flies out, doesn't detect the fire in the basement, and the call is cancelled as a false alarm.

Will taxpayers really get $6M of value out of the fleet?

Since the FCC has declared that Wifi blocking is illegal, why not just use your phone as a hotspot and then you don't need to carry around a network closet's worth of wifi equipment with you? Worst case, get a USB cellular modem and plug it straight into your laptop.

Doing all of that just to get "free" wifi doesn't make you a scumbag, it makes you a geek.

I think they mean that encryption on licensed Ham bands is illegal, since encryption over radio is perfectly legal (otherwise both Bluetooth and Wifi would be illegal).