He lead with:

Having looked over the Mars One plans I must say I am also highly skeptical, but hesitantly so, because you never know what can happen.

And you didn't stop an scroll right to the comments?

This sounds tough, but how much of the high risk- low success operations being done contribute to the high cost of health care in the US?

Absolutely none. It does however contribute greatly to the total amount spent on health care in the US. Study after study has shown that (on average) something like 50-70% of an individuals lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last three years of their life.

Before you berate me for not reading the articles (which I have), you should actually read my reply.

It's not clickbait - it's the sexism everyone here claims is absent from the tech industry.

It can easoly go off of my property.

Maybe on your planet. Here on earth, they generally can't. On the other hand, bullets can trivially travel great distances. In the same way, except under very unusual circumstances the extraordinarily rare rampaging lawnmower can easily be avoided. A bullet than can't even be detected by human senses prior to it's arrival cannot.

Etc... etc...

Fortunately I, like practically every owner of a lawnmower, only use it to mow my lawn.

Which is completely irrelevant - we're not discussing you or practically anyone else. We're discussing a specific individual behaving in a specific manner.

Depending on the circumstance, it could easily be illegal. Many places have laws against discharging firearms. There are also in many places where discharge is legal - so long as it's not up into the air.

You're modded up - but you're actually comparing apples to oranges. Anyone with an IQ over room temperature does feel at least mildly threatened when adjacent to traffic - because it is a somewhat dangerous place to be.

But adjacent is the key word, while on the other hand the lethal weapon on a drone is dangerous at considerable range, both from the drone and from the operator. That's why many inhabited places have laws against discharging a firearm - but not against driving. That's why they're looking to see if the operator should be charged, but I'll be in no danger of being charged simply for operating a motor vehicle when I run errands this afternoon.

If he shoots people or trespasses there's existing law. Flying a hobby project on private land with a gun or a container of fireworks may be ill-advised -- but you don't need to make another law because you feel threatened by the brave/stupid things people choose to do with their life and property.

Let's not mince words here, and call a spade a spade - he didn't fly a hobby project, he flew a lethal weapon. A lethal weapon whose range can very likely reach far beyond the bounds of the private property. Thus, yes, I should feel threatened because all it takes is a few more feet of altitude, or not paying attention to bearing, or any of a dozen other minor lapses and suddenly I have bullets flying towards me.

The comparative lengths of the two field trials is quite possibly the stupidest and most irrelevant thing you can bring up - because they occurred against completely different backgrounds.

When it comes to making a decision, they drop the black ball in the fishbowl and that's it. No regrets, they just prefer the company of their own generation.

In other words, it's age discrimination - dressed up in fancy words to make it look like it's not. A rotting rose by any other name still stinks.

Combining carbon dating with other techniques should be enough to remove ambiguity in dating.

"Other techniques" not only have different ranges of time for which they're accurate, they also have different levels of accuracy. (And not all are applicable to all materials.) They may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity.

I've heard of a handful of machines still surviving from the early 1950s to WW2 days, but they're few and far between, and most of those are probably gone by now.

That would be my oldest machine - the MK113 Torpedo FCS, basically a Really Fancy version of the WWII era TDC. The first entered service with USS Thresher in 1960, and the last left service when USS Kamehameha was decommissioned in 2003. Quite a run for a machine whose core functionality came from an analog computer directly descended from a 1930's design.

Why the hell did it not catch on like FB?

Well, other than the idiotic "invite only" policy?

Well... it launched feature incomplete as compared to Facebook. Pages for example wouldn't be available for months after launch. Also, it took weeks to properly display Flickr links (in 2011, when Flickr still ruled the photosharing roost this was unnaceptable)... And when they did get it right, it was only kinda right. The thumbnails were very obviously downsampled and downsized - all the better to very visibly not compete with Google's Picasa service*.

The there was the stupid 'real names' mess just as G+ was starting to gain the smallest amount of traction.

Then there was emphasis on security and privacy over connection and sharing. (The latter being the whole point of a social network in the first place.)

Then there was whole tedious need to organize your Circles, G+ didn't work all that well (let alone as Google intended) 'out of the box'.

Etc... etc... Google kept shooting itself in the foot and giving people reasons not to switch or not to stay switched - and they did, in droves.

The basic problem is that Google is made up of geeks, not ordinary people - and they don't really grasp that their primary audience is ordinary people, not geeks.

This article is worth a read in that context, particularly points 3 and 4.

* Which a lame and half baked attempt to compete with Flickr.

That, and holy hell, phones really aren't a security risk. People are a security risk; if someone's allowed to see the same document a thousand times, they can simply memorize it instead of taking a picture.

Yeah, no way carrying a camera that can record the image of hundreds of documents in a short period or take pictures of classified equipment is a security risk.

I've never worked at a center where smart phones and the like were Verboten. This includes different govt. facilities too. Secure ones.

You haven't. Doesn't mean they don't exist.

One friend of mine works for the government and has two cellphones for just that reason - a smart phone that he keeps in a locker at the entrance, and a dumb phone he carries with him. (And even so, when he goes into the into the 'inner sanctum' (as it were) of secure spaces, he must surrender the dumb phone.)

Another friend works at a facility where not even dumb phones are allowed inside the fenceline.