FAA has historically taken this approach towards regulation and they catch flak for doing it that way, too. Many of the FARs exist because someone died doing XYZ in or with an aircraft, so they made a new rule that says you can't do XYZ in or with an aircraft.

RC aircraft have been a hobby for many years and most enthusiasts stick to a stringent set of (voluntary) safety rules developed by the Academy of Model Aeronautics. Now that "drones" have become popular, widely available, and relatively cheap, thousands of people are playing around with them and they aren't the responsible hobbyist type. You can get a camera capable quadcopter for under $100, they even sell one model at Wal-Mart. Many of the folks buying these couldn't care less about a voluntary code of safety, and I'm on the FAA's side here, there need to be rules with teeth to back them up.

Putting anything in the air for commercial purposes has always been heavily regulated and I for one don't see that as a problem.

Last I heard, a big part of Yelp's business model was to cold-call your business offering to hide those abysmal reviews for a small extortion^Wservice fee. I guess this company didn't play ball. It doesn't surprise me that a restaurant which has been hijacked on Google Maps is also suffering from a bunch of negative reviews on Yelp, someone is clearly targeting the business.

I don't want my DVM keeping any license holders' information. The draft is supposed to make veterans, not veterinarians!

Yeah, if waking up one day to find that most of your business has been handed over to another company is what passes for "notification" these days.

I hope Microsoft paid them handsomely.

Double bonus points, Jon died in 1998; if they can get to him, maybe we can sue Walt Disney and Sonny Bono for fucking up our copyright situation so badly.

Never heard of that, anywhere I've been it was always black and white, either fireworks are legal or they aren't. In the US most places where they're illegal it's because of injury and fire risk. They're illegal where I live but nobody really cares, it's about a 10 minute drive to the county line where you can stock up to your heart's content. The police do respond to fireworks calls when Debbie Downer makes a complaint, but unless you're doing something egregious like firing Saturn Missiles in the middle of the road or aiming stuff at someone's house on purpose, they usually just "remind" you that it's illegal and tell you to knock it off.

MADD is notorious for that sort of bullshit.

The answer is fairly clear: NSA has sufficient dirt on anyone with the power to fight this that they're too afraid to do so. We know they've tapped Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, presidential candidates, etc. We've reached a point where it's going to take one or more of these officials to get so fed up that they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Whatever's being used to keep them quiet, they're going to have to air it up front and then start in with congressional hearings.

If I were NSA, my biggest fear would be an unfriendly Senator who discovers he has a terminal illness. Not long to live, no re-election to worry about, and done giving a fuck whether people find out he's secretly gay and loves snorting coke with illegal immigrants. That man, the one with power and nothing to lose, that's the one who can bring the whole thing down.

And that's hardly anything new, either. Andrea Mitchell of NBC married Alan Greenspan in 1997; he was Chairman of the Fed at the time, and continued in that role until 2006. Nice little bit of "extraordinary access" NBC had there during Clinton's and W's presidencies.

The obvious joke response is that Facebook probably gets all kinds of funding from NSA.

A more serious response is that it's not quite clear. UCSF and Cornell both participated in this project to some degree, and they're both subject to HHS regulations since they do get federal funding. Whether or not the whole project was then required to follow the rules depends on what exactly the university participants did.

None of us know the whole story, and it's not likely that we ever will, unless he contracts some terminal illness and decides to write a telling memoir on his way out.

I'll agree that no one like you or me would ever have the same amount of "luck," primarily because it can't be luck. Kim has money and he has leverage. One doesn't always buy the other (to the chagrin of a litany of folks from George Jung to Bernie Madoff), but it seems clear that Kim has banked plenty of both. He's freely given out some of the juicy bits, like the MegaUpload accounts that were registered and used by USG and MAFIAA entities to engage in various copyright infringement. But he has more, and he's keeping it to himself.

The man may be a complete and total pompous douche canoe with a proven track record of dubious activity, but he isn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination.

Anyone who doubts this statement should have a look at this graph. Turns out that "Just Say No" was actually referring to whether or not you wanted to live outside of prison.

Mark Karpeles is a guy with a failed trading-card website who hired a few c0d3rZ to dabble in Bitcoin and wound up with a disaster. Tim Draper is a fairly well-known VC who's spent 30 years building both his reputation and a company worth billions of dollars. If you can't see the difference, I doubt anything I say will help, but Draper is incredibly unlikely to issue a statement like this if it isn't a) true, b) fully vetted by his legal team, and c) fully vetted by the other company's legal team.