Several posters incredulously have stated that the risk to the plane was nonexistent, equating it to a bird strike (which in fact *is* dangerous). This is just plainly irresponsible on their part. We in fact cannot say what the outcome of a collision would be but we can say the risk of loss of life or damage to the aircraft is not zero. Is this acceptable to you personally? Perhaps it's okay for strangers whom you do not know? Family and loved ones? The risk of collision, however small, is a completely preventable risk, and it shouldn't even be there in the first place. That's why authorities are coming down hard and harder on the hobby.

Whether the airplane was in real danger or not, this incident is just one more of what are becoming weekly if not daily occurrences and show the utter stupidity of some people who fly these RC toys in reckless and dangerous ways. Every serious RC modeler knows that there are restrictions flying near airports, and strives to be safe and situationally aware. These idiots flying their RC toys next to full-scale aircraft are neither safe nor situationally aware, and really are ruining the hobby for everyone, and it will be a loss to all of the rest of us. Yes I'm sure this is all said so often that it gets really old, but this story makes me very angry as someone who flies RC airplanes and the occasional quad, and the situation is not improving. Self regulation is not working because idiots don't self-regulate. So sooner or later the entire hobby will be banned (besides that, none of these airplane buzzers build their own craft; they just buy a ready-made unit and toss it in the air without any apparent thought), plain and simple.

The only problem with BASIC is that each compiler is its own non-standard dialect these days, many of which are proprietary, old-school non-FOSS institutions. FreeBASIC is very good, though, and open source. Modern dialects of BASIC (dunno about Visual Basic) are very structured and support a wide variety of programming paradigms from object-oriented to event-driven to procedural. Some dialects do enforce strong typing. So while you or I might not have reason to use BASIC as we have other languages we are equally at ease in, others might be right at home in BASIC and be able to write good code. For now I'm sticking to Python.

And of course this "D" language is not to be confused with the other "D" language, which is Turing complete.

While I'm sure one could over-engineer a sun tracker, I'm pretty sure almost all the ones on the market work as you suggest, with a turntable that turns 15 degrees an hour, just like clocks do. Of course it's not quite as simple as you suggest, because you may not want the panel to turn 360 degrees, but rather reverse back to morning position. And there is room for a lot of little things like calculating sunup and sundown times so that we don't waste energy moving when we don't need to. Also if you want to perfectly face the sun, you have to adjust your starting and stopping times for the equation of time as solar noon occurs at a different time each day throughout the year. At least if you want the panel to aim perfectly at the sun. Also the panel tilt can be adjusted each day to match the sun's declination. I'm sure many systems do all these things and do cost an arm and a leg. And yes I'm sure you could hack something together with Arduino for a couple hundred dollars. One of the reasons why enabling technologies like easy-to-use microprocessor systems are so disruptive.

Am I overthinking things? Surely. But it's fun. Forgive me for the long reply but I've been playing with sundials lately (generating them with a python script) and it's really fun and cool to try to make one as fancy and accurate as possible.

Sorry but saying Perl is a frontend to C is just silly. Not at all what I mean and you know it. Why do you write nonsense like this?

I'm speaking more akin to various languages that use LLVM to access the same object and name mangling system. The language is the frontend, LLVM is the backend. Swift could have been implemented as a translator that emits ObjC code (let's be honest it's all syntactic sugar). I see Swift as a prettier version of ObjC plus a few other pieces of syntactic sugar.

The real question is, can you program in swift without knowing any objc? At present I think you could, but understanding Objc enough to read it would be highly useful.

Is Pale Moon an actual fork, or is it just a rebranding of Firefox releases with a few built-in add-ons and configuration tweaks, such as the task bar and the traditional style? Is Pale Moon under active development and diverging from Firefox? I use Pale Moon, but I've yet to see that it's actually a fork.

But the clickpad has been in the Thinkpad line for years now. And it sucks there too. I don't mind the clickpad on OS X, but under Windows and Linux it's horrible.

Running Mint on my X220, and I cannot get the clickpad to work worth a darn It's jumpy, and the clicking part always moves the mouse cursor when I hit it. Also I can't rest my thumb on the pad while moving my index finger. The cursor just won't go anywhere. It's extremely annoying. I'm not sure whether this is Linux at fault or the pad itself. It might be the latter because I think Windows has the same problem. But either way the clickpad needs a lot more Linux developer love. At least the X220 has real buttons above the trackpad, and the trackpoint.

I disagree. Uselessd shows that systemd's parts are not as tightly coupled as people suppose. Just because they are all part of one umbrella project does not, in fact, mean they are tightly coupled and integrated in some sort of orwellian fashion. Uselessd proves this fact. And Uselessd is a good thing to have. Provides competition for systemd, provides a few features people want, and could pave the way for modern desktops like Gnome to run on non-linux systems such as BSD. Gnome isn't bent on having *the* "systemd" just the capabilities that systemd provides. If Uselessd can do it, so much the better.

As far as I can tell, Swift is just a new front-end to the Objective-C object system. So knowing how Objective-C works will be beneficial to working in Swift.

Also most of the libraries and frameworks you will be working with are Objective-C and most of the current tutorials and online resources probably use Objective-C in their examples. That's not to say you need to start with ObjC, but be prepared as you use Swift to learn a bit about it, at least enough to read and translate example snippets you see.

If my understanding of Swift is accurate, one can intermingle Swing and ObjC libraries and modules. They should have the exact same calling convention and object semantics. Perhaps Swift is easier to remember without some of the more unusual aspects of ObjC's syntax.

Umm no. I meant that besides my own phone I've seen countless android phones of different kinds (mostly Samsung) and not one with a shattered screen. I've seen many shattered iPhones though.

When this new distro no longer refers to *any* debian repos, maintaining and compiling their own deb packages entirely, then I'll recognize it as a fork. Until then it's just one of many distros that base themselves off of debian and its package base while changing parts they don't like.

I bet there is a high probability that Devuan will be based on uselessd. If so it will be interesting to watch the approach. Uselessd, if anything, validates the original ideas of systemd, just taking issue with the packaging, as near as I can tell.

I too wish them well, but I do not hold out much hope that they will go anywhere.

Really? Posix dictates a particular init system? I don't think you really understand what Posix means.

Lame!

It's not a "drone" with all the sinister connotations. It's a radio-controlled flying toy that you are really after.

The cheapest, best, off-the-shelf one you can buy right now is the DJI series and it's about $1200. And that's more of a mapping and photography tool than a toy.

You can, however, build an RC toy for about the price you mention, and it would be a lot more fun. Forget the camera for now (though you can add a camera later easily enough). Some wood scraps, motors, speed controls, props, battery, radio with receiver, and a HobbyKing KK multirotor controller and you're in business. A tri-copter would be quite fun to build and fly (requires a servo to tilt the one rotor). I think you would get far more long-term fun from a project like that.

http://www.instructables.com/i...

A prebuilt unit that costs $150 will be fun for a day or to for you, and then I suspect it will be crashed and lie broken in a drawer.

People seem to think that RC aircraft are things they can just toss into the air and enjoy for hours. But it will take some serious work and training to learn how to fly them. If you take a bit seriously I guarantee you'll have a lot of fun.

I fly fixed wing and think that's funner than multi-rotor, but to each his own. I do plan to buy a DJI soon, though, although even in Canada the regs for using them in a pseudo-commercial way (say mapping) are murky.

What you say has a ring of truth to it, but from what I've read in the car magazines auto ownership is certainly stagnant, and the growth saw in the past is gone, and car companies seem to not know what to do to get demand back. They've tried the idea of a car being a lifestyle, and that didn't seem to do much especially. Now they are trying to go the entertainment route, putting everything and the kitchen sink into the center console. I highly doubt that's going to do much. Basically car makers are victims of their own success. They've saturated the market, cars are quite reliable now with minimal maintenance, and they are perceived as commodity items (albeit expensive ones). I think your arguments are likely to hold for some time yet, but the article's arguments are likely to hold more sway in the long term. The number of teenagers getting a drivinglicense is steadily declining from 30 years ago. Now arguably one huge factor in this is that they depend on others to drive them (parents or friends), but as they become adults they are likely to take their car apathy with them into the next generation. To them cars are just tools. They aren't lifestyle items anymore or fashion accessories. Just tools. When these kids who aren't car crazy begin to vote they might start voting for better public transportation, autonomous cars, etc.