What did you expect when Dish bought them?

You should have expected it.

Involuntary commitment to an institution is incredibly rare in the US. You need to be an active threat to yourself or others to be forcibly committed. For this to happen you basically have to prove to a court the person is going to hurt someone. Often this results in a guardian being appointed with power of attorney and that person can sign someone into a treatment facility.

There are very good reasons for this. Before these policies were in place, that required a court order to commit someone against their will, the commitment procedure was routinely used to commit someone that family, friends or someone with power wanted to put into a secure facility with little to no regard for their actual mental state. This resulted in things like during the 50's for it to be common for daughters deemed "promiscuous" to be involuntarily committed, even if they were well into their 20's. Or the towns rebellious kid from a poor family being committed and lobotomized because he the mayor didn't want his daughter dating that "freak".

Involuntary commitment is a very dangerous thing. It should be reserved for the most extreme cases because otherwise it will be abused. Although I don't like that most of the long term homeless in the US are actually mentally ill the fact is most of them want to be where they are. You can't have a free society if you are going to decide that if people don't abide certain societal customs that they need to be locked up and forcibly medicated. That direction lies authoritarian government. The only time involuntary commitment should even be an option is in the case of actual violence or imminent violence that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Hubbard had been committed several times and by all non-scientology accounts he was pretty friggen crazy. In the end he even tried to get someone in scientology to build a device that he could use to kill himself because of his depression.

Getting anyone committed or in a forced hold is almost impossible. You have to prove they are going to hurt someone physically. The woman ruined her life but I doubt she had one incident where she was deemed to be dangerous enough to warrant a hold and psychiatric evaluation. This is true even if you are married to someone.

After 20 years of crazy the guy probably had enough. At some point even if you love the person the crazy gets to be more than you can handle and you have to put your own needs above the needs of the marriage. I say this as someone that doesn't believes that marriage should be forever. But having first hand experience with mental illness in a loved one I can tell you that at some point people need to just take care of themselves so their own mental health doesn't deteriorate.

It's a self applied name. Someone called them crackpots and they called themselves 9/11 truthers. Now truther is an anachronism for crackpot by their own doing.

It got you to give Dice clicks now didn't it.

And you forgot to mention that starving people are very dangerous. They do things like whack the heads of the untouchable elites because they have nothing to lose whether they succeed or not.

He's saying "use drones to be able to use your limited resources more intelligently" - for example, focusing on getting that jaws-of-life to a potentially critically injured car accident victim rather than diverting to a probable false alarm house fire.

If you honestly think that such a thing even happens you are as foolish as him. You are creating a straw man with an event that's as rare as unicorn sightings.

The fact is that budgets are limited and you can't have an infinite number of rescue workers responding to everything.

Many of these budgets have fixed costs, for example you have 20 firefighters sitting around 24/7/365 (multiple shifts). And these firefighters aren't in new york responding to calls every few minutes. They spend 90% of every day sitting on their ass, just like every other sub-urban/rural firefighter.

And compared to the salaries and overheads of humans, drones are very cheap.

I see your malfunction now. You seem to think that drones fly themselves. That the guy sitting there flying the drone is invisible and doesn't cost salary and overhead. That the drone itself doesn't require maintenance, fuel, parts or will need a ground crew. You are WRONG. The drone is going to cost almost as much to operate as it would cost to put a plane up (except it's cheaper to buy than a plane). And the guy flying it? He's going to cost as much as a highly trained pilot because he's going to be one. This thing is the size of a fridge, it falls out of the sky and lands on someone it's going to kill them. The FAA isn't going to allow anything that size to be flown without someone with a pilots license behind the controls, as they've already decreed BTW.

You also seem to be of the view that drones are miraculous and can spot people in a gutter or a lost child in a forest. People in manned helicopters have a hard time spotting that stuff, how on earth do you think a drone could do it so easy?

Drones aren't miracles. You seem to think they are. This plan is nothing more than some jackass with a hobby that wants the taxpayers to fund it.

You forgot the fuel, maintenance and spare parts. I'd be willing to bet daily operating costs will be equivalent to having a plane up.

A plane is a plane, doesn't really matter if it's manned or not, it's still going to cost about the same, unless you think you can train bob the high school drop out to fly a drone and the drones operate on hugs and happy thoughts.

It really doesn't matter what you think the law is. If they can get a judge to go along, a jury to convict you and an appeals court to uphold it you WILL got to jail. The CFAA has allowed far lesser things to put people in jail. The CFAA is so incredibly generic that they can put you in jail for almost anything involving a computer, and it's so technical in nature that you're guaranteed a jury won't understand it which means the government has a major advantage. This is doubly true for the courts, both the original and the appeals.

I wouldn't be so cavalier about the CFAA, Aaron Swartz had a view similar to yours then he was looking at 25 years in Federal jail and killed himself under the stress of being raped daily for 25 years. What he did wasn't technically illegal either and the people involved didn't even want to prosecute him.

So most fire alarms are false alarms so the solution is to delay deployment of the fire department until a drone can see if the fire is real? He can't really be suggesting that because that would mean he's a complete fucking moron. The faster the response time of a fire department to an actual fire the lower the loss of life and the less property damage. If you are going to wait 30 minutes for a drone to launch and fly over the fire you are going to basically kill everyone that's in the building and burn down everything that catches fire.

And the Ironic thing is he acts like sending the fire department out to a call costs money. The firemen are sitting there on their ass all day long getting paid whether they respond or they don't. Sure there is a very small cost in fuel and other expendables if they do respond but to act as if the entire cost of the fire department is saved if they don't respond is completely idiotic.

This guy wants a toy and he's trying to convince the public to pick up the cost. That and he didn't think through his "example" at all.

The 1953 coup of Iran and installation the Shah was orchestrated by Britain to protect the British oil company, that changed it's name to BP, who was scared of losing access to the oil wells through nationalization. The US assisted to placate the British and so they could continue to use Iran as a base against the Soviets.

Everyone always blames the US but the entire thing was orchestrated by Britain. People blame the US because they seized the US embassy, when in fact they just seized the embassy of the most powerful country they could to try to force the Europeans to give them back the Shah. The seizure had little to nothing to do with the US involvement, in fact they almost took the Soviet embassy instead but were afraid of the retaliation and figured America couldn't retaliate.

All the problems of the middle east can be traced back to the colonial actions of Europe. The reason they are perpetually at war is because the British and French carved up countries without any regard whatsoever to cultural or ethnic boundaries. For example, Kurds comprise a significant population within the middle east and were deliberately divided between 4 countries to prevent a Kurdistan being created.

I really wish the world and particularly the sanctimonious Europeans would stop throwing this at America's feet. These problems exist because of YOUR hubris, not ours. The dysfunction of the western hemisphere is the US's fault, you can take the blame for what you did to Africa, the middle east and SE Asia.

Saddam was killed by fellow Iraqi's, the video's on the internet.

Gaddafi? He got it in the ass with a knife by a bunch of people from Misrata that had been under siege for better than a year, the man believed to have killed Qaddafi had himself lost several members of his immediate family to the snipers and indiscriminate bombing and artillery fire along with most of the people with him.

The US is at best peripherally responsible in Gaddafi's case in that we assisted in the degradation of the Libyan military so they wouldn't have the ability to shell and kill innocent civilians (though much of the actual bombing was done by Europe, particularly Italy). Though Saddam was killed because the US deposed him with force he was ultimately tried and executed by Iraqi courts and he got a pretty clean death given what generally happens to dictators like him (see the Gaddafi example).

Just because the US made some deal with these people don't mean the US perpetually obligated to protect them. To suggest they are is just absurd.

Fox News is an interesting phenomenon. Murdoch is retiring and his kids are not like him. In fact most of the kids hate Roger Ailes (head of Fox News) at least if you go by what's reported in the press. That's the reason for the quick press release by Fox news that Ailes would continue to report to Rupert when James took over which was immediately repudiated by the corporate side. I'd be willing to bet that over the next 5 years or so Fox will begin to change and that change will accelerate heavily once Rupert dies. I wouldn't be surprised to see Roger Ailes fired in the next couple years.

And the Republican "smaller government" Rand'ian libertarian meets the end of the US economy. The road and transportation system in the US is what drives the US economy. The construction of the US interstate system created the largest and longest running economic boom the US has ever seen. In fact I'd argue that the continued decline in infrastructure funding is one of the factors in the still struggling US economy.

Free movement of people and good in a timely matter on maintained safe roadways is an essential part of our economy. Republican's used to know this but since the Rand'ians amongst them have taken over the asylum any and all government spending is bad, regardless of how important that spending is. Roads and infrastructure are key components of our economy, and you can count on one thing if these republicans get their way, which is the decline of the US economy.

Though I have no doubt that during the boom years some rural road building was over done, but to argue as this idiot does is plain foolishness. Beyond a certain traffic level gravel roads actually cost far more to maintain than asphalt or concrete roadways. In fact that cost is so high that it becomes foolish not to pave them. It's this shortsightedness that has begun to dominate the Republican party, where ideology is more important than reality.

We can only hope that the coming Republican demographic Armageddon will take place before they can cause long term permanent damage to the US economy. There are very few cases where infrastructure spending is a bad idea.