Which would be fine, except the DC FRZ (flight restriction zone) is a 30-mile circle around the Capital within which it is illegal to fly ANY remote control device of any kind. Includes "drones" as well as those toy RC helicopters at the mall kiosks, and the sort of RC planes that people have been flying around for many decades. Some tourist flying a quad in DC is in for a very rude awakening, as has already happened.

Wouldn't matter. Do you understand how small the White House grounds are, and how fast even a modest quad can fly when it means business? I've got one that can do over 40mph. That would cover the distance from the sidewalk in front of the White House to the middle of the typical speech-giving area of the Rose Garden in well under 8 seconds. A drone flying waypoints - with no need for a human controller nearby or watching - could be moving that fast well before it gets to the White House fence, and be coming in 200' overhead, be above a high-profile press event in seconds, cut power and drop like a stone spewing a mist of cesium or a nice cloud of serin or laden with a nice little brick of C4, and it would be on the ground in the middle of that speech/ceremony so fast you'd have no ability to do something about it. Except maybe light it up with some sort of automated buckshot gatling gun, right in the middle of a busy urban area.

This is going to result in a lot more events being held indoors.

At least it's no longer flying in restricted airspace... :)

Meddia is not the same thing as software, so your examples really don't apply in this case. Better examples are:

ASHTON-TATE CORP. v. FOX SOFTWARE, INC. -- NO. CV 88-6837 TJH (TX).

Lotus Development Corp. v. Paperback Software International. U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts. June 28, 1990. 740 F.Supp. 37, 15 USPQ2d 1577

The interpretation that the federal government is holding forth here is that both of these cases were adjudicated incorrectly.

If the Supreme Court fails to hear the current case, both of those previous cases are defacto overturned.

You can effectively say "goodbye" to the software industry, if companies are allowed to enforce interface copyrights. At least in the U.S.. Obviously, other countries will just ignore the U.S.'s idiocy, and continue on their merry way, and quickly surpass the U.S. in software development, just as they have in other economic areas.

Easy detection method #48:

(1) Send out a large electromagnetic pulse

(2) If it falls out of the sky, it was a drone

This.

It's pretty obvious that this is a punishment for adding encryption to Android devices, and for going to SSL for all web transactions, making it much more difficult to spy, despite administrative objections.

The recommendation is clearly punitive because Google has pissed the executive off, and consistently opted on the side of data protection, and has disclosed many of the recently discovered OpenSSL and SSSL protocol flaws which made eavesdropping easier.

The Open Group claims the copyright on the POSIX specifications. If APIs can be copyrighted and this copyright includes all implementations, then it would be problematic for all open source *NIX systems. Of course, they might decide to provide a license that's valid for everyone except Oracle (though writing such a license in a way that's GPL compatible would be very hard, so glibc might be in trouble).

The thing that killed DC in the war of the currents was that step up and step down transformers for AC are easy and cheap to build, but doing the same thing for DC caused a lot more loss (one of the simplest ways of doing it was to convert to AC, do the voltage change, and then convert back to DC). For long hauls on the grid, you want a much higher voltage than in houses. Now, however, it's relatively cheap (both in terms of convertors and in terms of loss) to produce DC-DC converters. USB-C supports 5V (up to 2A), 12V (1.5-5A) and 20V (3-5A). It's fairly easy to imagine 48V between rooms and then a converter in the sockets able to provide USB voltages. You wouldn't want to run a heater or a vacuum cleaner from it, but it would be nice for a lot of consumer electronics.

We're not talking grid back-haul though, we're talking a few tens of metres maximum within a house. I've wondered for a while if it would be more efficient to have moderately high voltage DC room-to-room and then low-voltage DC in rooms. Given the number of things in my house that would prefer a DC supply and so end up with (cheap and inefficient) AC to DC convertors per plug (and especially if you use LED lighting), it seems like it ought to be a win. And now seems like a good time to do it, as USB-C is a consumer connector that can provide up to 100W via something that's designed to be very cheap to produce in the lower power variations.

Top 10% probably. Take a look at a global rich list calculator. You can live very comfortably in a western country with 9% of the world's population being richer than you. If you're in some parts of central or eastern Europe, or a few parts of south-east Asia then you may be near the bottom of the top 20% and still living very comfortably. The '1%' that people talk about in the USA are well in the top 0.1% globally, but 'the 1%' makes a better soundbite than 'the 0.1%'.

Fewer seamen suffer from PTSD than VB coders.

I find it hard to consider anyone who owns a house (even with a mortgage), especially in one of the places with the highest property prices in the world, poor. This scheme seems very odd, because the poorest residents of California are renting, they don't own houses (well, the poorest are homeless), who can't just stick solar panels on top of a house that they're renting.

Well, if they are going to poll what our favorite analytical instruments are for measuring a gas composition, or our opinion on where we should be sending unmanned probes to search (new) life forms, (or something IT related where I would choose the CowboyNeal option), then I'd be ok with the poll having a prominent spot on the page.

But seriously... a poll about a major Hollywood production that really doesn't need any more advertising because it is already all over the internet??? Come on, Slashdot, I do not come here for anything Hollywood related.

The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was more along the lines of:

Boris: "We need something to distract the people at home! They are getting restless!"

Piotr: "How about a war? That's always worked in the past!"

Boris: "Yes, but against who? We have to pick something close enough to be threatening, but far enough away that they won't come here!"

Piotr: "How about Afghanistan?"

Boris: "Perfect! Whoever heard of a Moslem holding a grudge?"

So... would a foundry based on this tech... be a "wood-chipper"?