You have no idea what you're talking about. A passing car is louder than a small, well-tuned quad with quality balanced rotors at ground level. 30' in the air? Barely audible. There are noisier ones. I work with a 25-pound octo that sounds completely horrifying, and I know when and where to operate it. But thanks for speaking out of ignorance - it helps to put all of this stuff in perspective.

It was in the low 50's (about 11C) outside on game day.

The balls were found at 10.5 psi, and the minimum Regulation pressure was 12.5 psi.

So, 84% of regulation pressure means (since pressure is proportional to temp, all other things being equal) that the balls would've had to be inflated in a 338K environment. Which is 150F.

I suppose the Pats could've inflated the balls in a sauna, but it's rather unlikely that the Refs would've failed to notice that the balls were hot enough to burn them when they checked the temps before the game.

In other words, no, the Pats cheated. Did their cheating matter in the end? Nope, the Colts sucked so much that day that the Pats could've played fair and won.

Alas, playing fair isn't something they're all that familiar with.

Asking myself the same question, I went with MDisc technology, in the BluRay capacity, in addition to my hard drive backups. MDisc uses an inorganic pigment as opposed to the organic dyes that are common on CD/DVD/BluRay recordables (and degrade over time).

I'll do an MDisc burn every year and move it offsite, to keep with the 4TB ZFS drive I rotate offsite weekly. The MDisc won't get my mp3 or mp4 files, but the stuff I can't recreate.

My best idea currently is to write PAR files of loop-back mounted LUKS volumes and include the PAR software source and ISO of the distro on the disc, in case I need the data in 20 years (emulators should be readily available for 2015 hardware).

I needed a BluRay writer anyway, so I went with this LG and it's been a great drive so far, and at the right price point for me.

You can't reduce risk to zero. And I think that's the major problem with how we think of things. Instead of taking some common sense improvements incrementally these days, we go overboard. If the risk aversion outpaces our advancement in processes and tech, then we start suffering opportunity costs when we keep trying to remove risk.

If you can use a VPN to do your work, by all means, do it at home. If you're a garbage collector... the more time you can't work, the less you get done. And the more trash piles up. You want to protect those workers, but if you start becoming overprotective, shit starts piling up. Literally.

Only if you're talking about office drones. There are a lot of those in a city, to be sure, but many people in a service economy need to go to a workplace.

Fact is, there are a great deal of people who lose out when they aren't able to go to work. There are even IT types who need still need to visit data centers on occasion.

And perhaps compared to the past, we have fewer manufacturing jobs, but we still do have those too. Again, worked at by people who probably need the money.

The inaccuracy in the prediction seems to be not about the magnitude of the storm, but about how far south it would hit (and, in particular, whether it would hit New York City).

Nice discussion of the various models' predictions here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

Close to 2 feet here and still coming down.

I think people forget just how quickly a snowstorm can get serious if people don't stay off the road. If the plows can't keep up, you are driving first through a light dusting, then an inch, then a couple of inches. Sooner or later cars start to skid. Or, you will have a chunk of interstate that uphill and ONE car isn't able to make it up the hill, stops, cars behind it stop, etc.

Maybe it's not "historic" but it's a big serious snowstorm.

Or, you are yourself a toxic seed planted by The Man in order to foment FUD and make good people not want to be part of these projects. Or something like that. Give it a rest with the absurd conspiracy crap.

Quoted for truth.

Correction: I get close to 50% better battery life. When searching for "mac linux battery duration" the first linksays: "The only two things I *really* loved in OSX were:
* longer battery life
* very fast and efficient suspend/resume".

The second link says: "720p - Mac OS X ...
Result on 720p playback: +1h57 or +42% battery life."

The third link says: "To date the best estimated battery life value I have seen under Linux is 5 hours (I have not run an actual timed test yet) as compared to 7.5 in Mac OS"

Just one web search, three results all saying the same thing I have tested & seen for myself. OS X is much better than Linux. Shut yer trap linux bigot.

I've flown that exact same piece of equipment at 3:00 AM, just for fun. Not on Pennsylvania Ave in downtown DC, of course. But if the guy's a hobby flier up late on a weekend night playing with this quad copter, maybe trying to get a couple of cool scenic night time shots, is that so hard to believe? Or is your tinfoil hat so tight that you're also going to assume I can't possibly have been up late updating firmware, swapping some motors around, and then stepped outside in the low-traffic, peaceful night time hours to test my handiwork? Can't be! I must be an FBI stooge! Please.

The problem is that the incoming drone could easily be flying below tree-top height. Like, 20 feet off the ground. Laser counter measures would be shooting at a target that would have large office buildings and other structures directly behind it.

Just look up the "DC FRZ" - it's illegal to fly any sort of RC device in a 30-mile circle around DCA. That absolutely includes the White House grounds, and large swaths of the surrounding suburbs.

I do understand the problem of a limited money supply, but I don't think they're seriously considering leaving the euro, so talking about an independent monetary policy is pointless. They need to bring in more money, and while they maintain the euro, they either need to borrow or somehow change monetary policy related to the euro to suit them. Borrowing still seems more likely than a change in Eurozone monetary policy.