Those are not mutually exclusive things. Especially when you're talking about two words four decades apart.

Because I'm the guy flying over my neighbors' swimming pools to take pictures of people in bathing suits.

Science-deniers, particularly those seeking to deny science based on statistics, frequently cherry pick statistics. That's how you get the whole "18 year no warming" claim.

I don't care about your excuses. I think you should be banned from flying over a property if the property owner deems he doesn't want you flying over his property, and further, I think a property owner should have the right to shoot your toy out of the sky and send you a bill for the bullet. I'd actually make it a criminal charge with a minimum $50,000 fine. I'd make it so expensive and difficult for you to play with your little kiddy toys over my property that you'd finally just go fucking home.

Self entitled assholes like you have made it clear the only way to deal with drones is to make it so damaging for assholes like you to even fly one that you find some other toys to play with

In New Zealand, as in other Commonwealth Realms, public land is owned by the Crown, so the Queen in Right of New Zealand, can set any regulations it wants on who can fly over Crown land.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

Oh, cry me a river. Drone operators no longer have an unlimited right to invade people's privacy and endanger their safety. Sorry dude, but the airspace is common property and it's sensible to regulate its use for the common good. Either that, or we can have drone wars, where people who don't want your drones in the skies fly their own to take them down.

Sooner or later it's going to happen elsewhere. The extraordinary lack of etiquette and basic decency among some drone owners is steadily going to make the public outcry to do something about the problem greater and greater.

Stop flying your fucking toys over my fucking property.

Except that also means other insects we like a lot less are also likely evolving resistance, which means we'll produce even nastier toxins and start wiping out bee populations again.

Because the poor will be greatly benefited by rain belts shifting away from them, or being knee deep in water.

And where exactly will the US get its grain from when the rain belt ends up in northern Canada?

The Beringia hypothesis has the advantage of not invoking a paleolithic ship construction industry. I know this is all very romantic, but for the moment, there is little evidence beyond some chicken bones that even Polynesians, within the 1,300 to 1,500 years (the settlement date of Easter Island) made it in any significant numbers. The simplest explanation is that multiple groups, some with different genetic heritages, went across the land bridge, some basically settling there until the end of the glacial maximum, and others possibly coming later. Multiple waves don't require multiple routes.

I'm thinking the worst aspect of that higher gravity would be a much denser atmosphere. We certainly could survive in 1.6g environment, but we couldn't survive the crushing weight of that atmosphere.

Well, bully for you. I bet you feel all special posting this here. Makes you feel superior and important I bet.

For the moment, I think we need to point to the simplest hypothesis, which is these genes were present in at least of the proto-Indian populations that went over the land bridge. That's not to exclude the possibility of new evidence pointing towards some sort of trans-Pacific input into the Americas, but the evidence, as small a body as it is, simply does not support that conclusion. More studies will be needed to determine if there are other loci for these genes, in the hopes of establishing at least the rudiments of a migration pattern.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.