Because a) most US cities have ordinances prohibiting arial fireworks (and some prohibit all fireworks) without a permit/license, and b) Many states prohibit the sale of arial fireworks, or limit the size to a few grams, or less than N feet (meters) off the ground, or all of those things.

The better question would be to ask why these regulations exist, and the answer is to prevent this:

http://icelandreview.com/news/...
http://icelandreview.com/news/...

Also Iceland in mid-winter carries a much lower fire risk than much of the US in mid-summer.

I like setting off my own, but there are upsides to municipal displays as well:

* They're usually choreographed.
* They're cheaper (free).
* Less running away from lit fuses and more sitting back and enjoying.

If Snowdenâ(TM)s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 âoetransparency report,â the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last yearâ(TM)s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowdenâ(TM)s sample, the officeâ(TM)s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

900k, not 10k.

Do you think a salmon is 1,000,000 times smarter than an ant? Because that's the consequence of applying a linear timeline to exponential growth.

How smart is an ant anyway? Or a salmon? Or a dog? How do you quantify it? Are they 3 smart? Maybe 11?

But to indulge your arbitrary metrics for "smartness," we can simulate entire colonies of ants already: http://www.not-equal.eu/myrmed...

So maybe the future is closer than you think. Six or seven closer.

Let my preface this by saying that I believe all parallel construction should be illegal, and I hope/believe that it will eventually be ruled accordingly. Partial truths are still deceit, and dishonesty in the legal system opens it up to (further) abuse. It's either illegal to lie under oath, or it is not, and the government should hold itself to the same standard that we expect of citizens.

That said, parallel construction is precisely about concealing the impetus. The classic example is a traffic stop that appears to be random, but is actually targeting a vehicle. The targeted vehicle could well have been stopped solely for whatever reason police used, and so that's the "parallel construction," even though police knew exactly which vehicle they wanted to stop.

"You'd be told only, âBe at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said. http://www.reuters.com/article...

Bringing a canine unit to the storage facility would allow the officer to tell the partial truth that he got a hit on a storage unit during a walk-through, even if the impetus for bringing the dog and doing a walk-through was because of a CI (and even if the hit was prompted). The deceit isn't in saying how the contraband was actually discovered/acquired, but in what the impetus was for using that (perfectly legal) method in the first place. That part is the "parallel construction."

Now you might have been saying that GP's speculation that it was parallel construction is wrong, but we're all just speculating on what the officer might have been doing anyway. Maybe it was just a recreation for the camera and they forgot to edit that part out.

I know that the evidence supporting the existence of souls is about as compelling as the evidence for mermaids. Maybe slightly lower actually, since people have actually claimed to see mermaids.

Also, don't forget to blink. You wouldn't want your eyes to dry up!

And since there seem to be lots of "off" switches, this is really just adding to the list. (Unless stimulating it can actually bring someone out of a coma?)

But also be pretty awesome to be "instantly" transported to the future! Woohoo!

At some point costs (labor requirements) will be so low that an entire population doesn't need to work full-time, or even anything approaching full time, in order to meet them. This is most clearly visible when looking at the amount of money we spend on food -- costs have decreased so dramatically that food costs as a percent of income are lower than income taxes in most cases. So what happens when the costs of other goods and services decrease accordingly? What happens when we don't have to pay people to create those goods and services, because they're created by machines? When grain is harvested by self-driving combines, and transported to market on self-driving trucks, and vended by automated machines? Because all of the other parts of the supply chain have already been automated -- those are the few that remain. The costs of goods and services will approach zero, even if they never quite get there.

We currently accommodate this through unemployment -- reducing the size of the workforce and making people compete for available positions instead of lowering the time per individual. We leave it up to individuals to either re-task or retire. And reductions in the workforce are sustainable -- up to about 1 worker per family. After that it starts to fall apart.

Automation is happening all around us, but we keep our collective heads in the sand because *our* jobs haven't yet been obsoleted, and because we fail to imagine a day when that could happen. I'm not saying it will be a utopia by any means. On the contrary, I don't think humans are generally wired to be happy and content, and we will always find things to be unhappy about. What I am saying is that we need to plan in order to avoid the dystopia that will necessarily ensue from massive unemployment and the lack of a societal model to accommodate it.

Of course, we can't even execute an effective, collective plans for more concrete "when not if" scenarios like natural events, so I'm not holding my breath for realistic plans to address near-zero cost existence.

Indeed. We need to start talking about what our world should look like when people don't need to work.

Actually, GP was correct, and you seem to be misinformed. The notion of parallel construction originated in protecting CIs, and has been used for that purpose for decades. Extending it to cover illegal NSA wiretaps was a more recent development.

I would not recommend Grails at all. First, if for no other reason, it's a bit player, so good luck finding developers, tools, help, and all of the other benefits you get with using a language/framework with a large, thriving community. That alone should be enough to steer you away from using it for enterprise anything.

Aside from that, boolean truths are quirky, to put it kindly.

Null evaluates to false, which is ridiculous and doesn't eliminate the need to check for null, just hides the problem if you forget to do it. This is because groovy uses "null objects." Null objects mean yay! no null pointer exceptions, but the consequence is... no null pointer exceptions! So have fun tracking down bugs when things fail silently.

Variables defined in closures (which is most of them) are opaque, so you can't easily inspect them without printing them out or logging them. So now you have no NPEs and no easy way to check for null values versus empty values while debugging without adding debugging code into production code. Ugh! Don't forget to annotate the debug code so you can remove it when you're done.

You don't get compile-time errors for things like using undefined classes/methods (typos!) or sending the wrong argument types. Instead, you have to compile, run, and look at massive stack traces throwing up all over your console/log: http://pastie.org/583115 Then rinse and repeat until it actually runs. And that's before you even start testing actual functionality.

Method entry and class loading breakpoints aren't supported. (This is simply an inconvenience most of the time, but it's worth noting IMO.)

Conversely, since groovy uses convention over configuration, IDEs may flag things as errors which are not. IntelliJ IDEA probably does the best at handling Groovy/Grails, but it still has some issues. My experience was that Intellisense/autocomplete didn't work reliably for Groovy in any IDE, so if that's important to you, you may miss that.

It's not clear where business logic should go. http://bartling.blogspot.com/2...

It's buggy. https://jira.grails.org/browse...

To be fair, I'm heavily biased against dependency injection, dynamic typing, and coding by convention, which are the very concepts Grails is built around. I could go into all of the reasons, but any flamewar worth its salt will list them all for you.

It's Italy. Which makes sense, since the Mediterranean and near-east are known for flatbread, even if some of the toppings we put on it today originated in the US (like pineapple).

Also the word "soccer" was coined in the UK, not the US. We just like to take credit for everything, apparently.

Here's the thing about gov't software conspiracies: they use the same software! There is no "special" government version of WIndows or OpenSSL. It's all COTS. If the NSA was exploiting vulnerabilities that left themselves and other agencies exposed, then that's extremely irresponsible, but just foolish as well. I'm not saying it's never happened, but it's not a sustainable policy.