I know its a fun conspiracy theory and all but I don't think the double standard is deliberate, even if it does exist.

The only real double standard is that the government is rapidly advancing its UAV technology while keeping private industry from doing so. Notice how Greenpeace floated a blimp over the NSA data center? Good for publicity but not the most efficient way to gather the photos they did.

Amazon shouldn't be calling them drones, though - drones kill Pakistani children, aerobots save puppies.

They better act fast if they want to skirt the law with yeast, while there's still a law to break.

It's still a good idea if you want pure chemicals - yeast can produce chemicals faster (to both grow and purify) than plants. Companies like the one Gov. Johnson is heading up would probably be very interested as a supply source for their refined products.

The trick is medicinal cannabis has something like 250 active compounds. A few years ago everybody assumed that it was only THC that did anything (marinol, for instance). Now they know that CBD is the most active medicinally and Johnson is now talking about CBG as well. There's still more unknown about the others than there is known, so focusing on just a couple pure chemicals might miss out on benefits. Human bodies do a lot of signalling with various cannabinoids and here's this one plant that happens to also grow most of them. It should be a biotech bonanza, except for the crapitalistic reasons politicians try to keep it off the market.

But, um, yeah, get high on THC beer if you want. It would actually probably be a net-benefit for society since people will be satisfied with being less drunk. As a user of the road monopoly, I'd strongly support THC beer on the market.

Other sources have it as 'increase'.

Hey, knock off that fact-checking - people are incensed here!

That's total bullshit. We've had insurance and employment coupled here in my country for almost a century now and none of these clusterfucks have happened. The thing that causes the clusterfuck is a country that can't decide whether it wants to be religious or secular.

Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite)

Not enough for 3 billion people.

Whilst I can't say I've mentioned ECHELON, I've certainly known about it for at least 13 years. And why would anyone bother mentioning it when you would just have been labelled a tin-foil hat loon.

Dated 2001:
http://textuploader.com/kxe7

It's been on Wikipedia since then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think the consensus (amongst people who knew about ECHELON) back then was that all calls were recorded but they couldn't keep them for long.

How much evidence do you need considering that the NSA habitually lie and that whistle-blowers have said they record everything. They are spending a billion plus on a data centre when $27 million is estimated to be enough for the hardware to record all calls. If that doesn't sound like an attempt to record everything then I don't know what does.

And a couple of slashdot links for good measure:
NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics

One mentioning ECHELON:
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

If there's one thing Mars doesn't have enough of, it's Legos.

I thought it was Moms it was out of? Better idea, though: let's find some of the A/C's here and see if they fit.

Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.

And supposedly it is no faster than a real computer. What gives?

It's hard to say because it's all "secret sauce" (so everybody just plunks their heels down on some position rather than admit "I don't know") but one thing that's interesting to me is that a handful of blokes out of Canada appear to have built a computer that's about as fast as a Xeon that Intel needed a few billion dollars, thousands of people, and forty years experience to create.

And that was their first commercial version. Maybe somebody will rip one apart and find out it says "Xeon 2650" on the inside, but until that happens I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem to have at least one fairly remarkable accomplishment under their belts.

If the Google guys buy the upgrade, I'd be willing to bet five bucks that it's real, just very early in the development cycle still.

So, assuming he wasn't already dead, technically he didn't die in the Tesla.

Musk can still say, "no Tesla owner has ever died driving one of our vehicles," too, because he wasn't an owner, he was a thief.

Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".

As not only activists but almost everyone aware of the rampant abuse going on has been claiming for years, it is high time that the "under penalty of perjury" part of the DMCA claims is actually enforced. Mistakes can happen, nobody is perfect, but some companies have been taking down large amounts of content for years, repeatedly and with not even a slap on the wrist.

Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves.

I recently saw a cyclist come from the sidewalk on my right, cross an intersection diagonally across me (between two left-turning lanes of north/south traffic), get back up onto the sidewalk, and then later get into the bike lane going the wrong way, at an alarming speed.

As a motorist and a cyclist, I was completely stunned. It's cyclists like that why motorists hate cyclists.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic. But many many drivers forget that they are required by law to not run over cyclists, even if they are inconvenient.

I have seen more cyclists do ridiculous things than I could count. I give them a wide berth, but, I have to admit, some of them seem like they're trying to get killed.

Likewise, a lot of drivers more or less don't give a damn and will practically run them over, or off the road, or door them. Sometimes buses don't even obey bike lanes.

I won't ride a bicycle on city streets anymore.

Well, I hope not.

Seriously, aren't we already close enough to a literal police state? As a manufacturer, I would refuse to enable such an option for the police without a written warrant in my face. Is that feasible during a car chase? Too bad; that's the price of liberty.