Except that if you read the majority opinion they actually open up any provision of the law to challenge on the same grounds. They warn that the ruling should not be taken as covering anything covered by insurance, but presumably any such thing could in principle be challenged on the same basis, and depending on the circumstances might likewise be exempted. The majority has opened the door to challenging the application of any provision of this law to a closely held corporation -- indeed any provision of any law. They just don't know how the challenge will turn out.

It's interesting to note that the court broke down almost exactly on religious lines when dealing with contraception. Five of the six Roman Catholic justices voted with the majority, and all three Jews joined by one dissenting Catholic. I think this is significant because the majority opinion, written exclusively by Catholics, seems to treat concerns over contraception as sui generis; and the possibility of objections to the law based on issues important to other religious groups to be remote.

Another big deal in the majority opinion is that it takes another step towards raising for-profit corporations to the same status as natural persons. The quibbling involved is astonishing:

Which may be true, but it's irrelevant. The question is whether compelling a for-profit corporation to do something impacts the religious liberties of natural persons in exactly the same way as compelling a church to do that same thing. If there is any difference whatsoever, then then the regulations imposed on the church *must* be less restrictive than the regulations imposed on a business. Logically, this is equivalent to saying the regulations imposed on a business *may* be more restrictive than the regulations imposed on a church.

Particularly a $12 movie, which is what they would have to cost to equal the cost of the Pill. (Not counting the mandatory biannual medical exams, without which you can't get a prescription.) Ginsberg noted in her dissent that the cost of an IUD is comparable to a month's salary for a person making minimum wage. Then again, I'm sure you'll also agree that the cost of your own vaccines and blood transfusions are also reasonable when those folks start claiming their exemption under this stupid ruling.

and the ocean (much like the oil from the BP spill) is taking care of itself.

Yeah, right? And how do we know that millions of gallons of crude oil and millions of tons of plastic aren't good for the ocean?

Bam! Got you there, right? You don't hear that from your so-called "scientists", amirite? Probably, carbon dioxide plus plastic and crude oil are combining with gamma rays from space to make us healthier! And smarter! At least some of us, that is. But not Al Gore, who is fat.

The operating system will look and work differently based on hardware type.

God, I should hope so.

Remember, sending up this satellite might just help us learn that AGW is not a problem, proving that you were right all along.

Don't be mad at Science. Someday, your incomplete in freshman physics will not matter any more.

If my feet are cold, that means I can't possibly have a fever. Fact.

No one tests them because doing so is actually quite irrelevant for the end user. One way of gauging devices ability to receive is to unplug the antenna and inject signals. Then you get the receiver sensitivity of the device. You'll find in the mobile phone industry the sensitivity will be almost identical across the board. There are relatively few vendors of chipsets which all the devices use.

Then you're left with the quality of the antenna. Unfortunately one antenna may not be better or worse than another. Small chip antennas like the ones in phones are notoriously non-uniform in receiving pattern. They typically have gain profiles with all sorts of weird shapes and sideloabs.

What would this mean for the end user? Do you prefer a universally equal antenna with gain in all directions which never works at the edge of coverage? Or would you prefer a device which has some gain in a weird shape which will work providing you're literally not holding it wrong? I take a dig at Apple's comments but the reality is true in the RF world. My phone (not an Apple device) has quite a poor signal right now. Moving or turning it slightly can result in a 6-12dB difference in gain.

What benefit is it to the end user to know the RF performance of a device is slightly higher than another if you can decimate your signal just by taking one step?

Small multi-rotor craft suffer from lifting capacity. You can put big motors and high speeds on the thing, and those electrics are actually quite quiet. However to get lifting capacity you need to move air and many quads that aren't a $60 toy are laid out with large props quite close together. You end up getting incredible amount of noise from air buffeting between the pair of counter rotating blades.

That article is completely senseless. Spying on someone with a toy drone would be the equivalent of going over to their house, knocking on their door, sticking a camera in their face and shouting at them "I'M DISCRETELY SPYING ON YOU NOW!"

Even the drone in the article is NOISY. It sets of dogs everywhere, it brings kids out to see what the noise is about, and as the article already says but doesn't acknowledge the camera has a 90+degree fov. So if you want to see your neighbours boobies while she's sunbathing you'll almost need to land it on her to get close enough.

Only a colossal idiot would consider using one of these toy drones for "peeping".

While I agree there's potentially safety issues with this hobby, overbearing regulations aren't the answer. You said it yourself, "few irresponsible people" you know those same people who are likely not to care about the regulations? We don't have restrictions on flying in Australia but when I look at the Communications Act, the vast majority of the people are flying equipment that is already illegal to use as we have different RF restrictions in Australia. Pretty much every 1.2GHz FPV kit (restricted frequency), most 900MHz systems (restricted power), most 450MHz system (restricted power), even some of the 2.4GHz stuff that you see on most hobby drones is illegal already, but people use them anyway.

More restrictions will affect the responsible, not the irresponsible.

You haven't seen a drone have you? They sound like a large angry swarm of bees from a horror movie. It would be the equivalent of a peeping tom setting up a photo studio in your hot tub or sun bathing area. It would be immediately obvious. Typically when I fly mine around neighbours from all over come out and find out what the noise is about. There's no discrete peeping with these things.

You've just dangerously oversimplified a complicated problem.

100m? What happens if you live on a property right in the flight path next to the airport?

Weight? Weight means nothing. I accidentally ran into myself with my 6kg hexacopter doing a stupid stunt. I ended up with bruises and a few broken cheap plastic props. On the flip side one of my friends flies this tiny little ~2kg quadrocopter which he also flew into himself. He ended up in hospital thanks to very high speed carbon fibre blades slicing him up his arms and his face. He ended up with quite a few stitches as a result.

So what's a reasonable restriction? Any quad could potentially kill someone. If you're interested in safety you'd need to take into account weight class, propeller speed, propeller type. Now you're talking private property, so if I fly my quad some 100m above my house on my private land and I have an incident, where will the quad end up? Prop failure, RF failure, actually every failure I've seen has resulted in a little multirotor craft not falling straight down. Maybe you should only be able to fly on private property if you live in an acreage?

This is much more complicated than you think.

It's "reign" because everybody's watching Game of Thrones.

why is it so evil to just use them as the primary mode of transportation?

"Evil"? You're arguing with a ghost now. There's nothing evil about roads or about cars or about mass transit. They are all modes of transport that are built or subsidized by the commons in order to serve people.

Any human institution can only be measured by how well it serves people. You seem angry at mass transit for some reason. Maybe because it doesn't serve you. But that's not the yardstick for decisions made by societies. Not how well it serves you but how well it serves us.

forced to use expensive, limiting, and impersonal transportation methods.

Mass transit, at least in my city, costs less (including "subsidies") per mile traveled than cars. And "impersonal"? Is that the problem here, that you can't hang your fuzzy dice and truck nuts on your friendly neighborhood transit car? Is this about you being behind the wheel of your own personal 3000 lb turbo-charged locomotive, the way God intended?

The good news is that nobody cares what you drive. But communities have to work. And more people in the US now live in cities than in rural areas. This is not because of the gummint, but because that's the way business likes it. Lots of consumers and lots of workers in one place.

But I'm still trying to wrap my head around "impersonal". I can't imagine anything more "impersonal" than the millions of Toyota Camry lookalikes and mommy SUV's clogging up the nation's roadways, each with one person behind the wheel. Each better than a ton of refined oil-burning, hydrocarbon-belching steel and plastic, just so that one person can get the average 6.2 miles that they queue up to crawl each day. I'll have to remember "impersonal". At least my bike has multicolored streamers coming out of the handlebars, and an officially licensed Chicago White Sox banner flying above so one of the Camry clones doesn't run me over because the driver is too busy texting to notice the fool passing them by on the recumbent bike.

In most of the world the cars and the fuel is taxed enough to not only cover their own costs (roads etc.) but also feed into other parts of the big government sinkhole.

Not even close. Does fuel tax cover the costs of the health problems from pollution? They haven't even touched the costs to society from the decades where gasoline had lead in it and the crime and social problems that caused.

At best, fuel taxes cover the costs of resurfacing a few roads. It doesn't touch new construction of infrastructure.

On the other hand, if you take my town as an example, the mass transit system has allowed many corporations to bring their facilities here because we have an educated workforce who can get to work without having to drive. Not in every location, but in major cities, the subsidies of mass transit pays for themselves many times over.