I've got a spare 2 hours to kill anyway. btw, Have you ever rented a car? The US tax code is simpler than the contract you sign...

Until April fools. Seriously, is this a joke? Maybe if they have a juicy gov't contract that'll buy these up. Other than that every company is just going to buy a Windows tablet for a $1000 and put their own security software (which is already certified and tested up the wazoo) on it.

The passengers aren't _doing_ anything. You don't need a license to sit in a chair for 8 hours. Skydivers don't jump out of planes in the middle of a city. When they do (for stunts and such) they generally have to get a permit. The FAA isn't being a dick, they're regulating a flying object that if it fell from the sky might kill somebody. This isn't rocket science, heck we regulate those for the same damn reasons. Do you not know what Terminal Velocity is? Haven't you heard the bit about the penny dropped from the Empire State Building. You know, regulators aren't all just jerks with sticks up their butt lookin' to ruin your fun. There's a reason you're not suppose to dive in shallow water. Lord, the stuff that gets modded up on /. these days...

are also big enough to go through the processes to properly train their people to ensure they're not causing disasters. Larger drones used for commercial purposes are, well, larger. If one of those toys you buy at Wal-Mart falls out of the sky I'm not so worried. Worst you do is dent my car. If a big commercial drone falls you don't dent it, you wreak it.

You see, regulation is _hard_. It's hard because everytime you write a regulation there's a thousand yahoos lookin' for a loop hole. It's like the monkeys and Shakespeare, get enough of 'em and and sooner or later they'll pull it off. So you get crap like "No drones for commercial use" because it's the only reliable way to regulate them, and regulating them is good for the mentioned wreaked car reasons.

As for GE, for Pete's sake's people stop electing far right ass hats. Then we can go back to a 90% top tier tax rate. Yeah, you balk now, but if we try taking 90% by the time they're done with the loopholes we might get 5%...

All of them take 5%-10% of your base revenue if you're games a success. I'm not saying it's not worth it; and it's nice that if you're breaking into the industry you can work with professional grade tools. But I can certainly see people wanting a truly free solution.

it's pretty well documented that Pearl Harbor was a conspiracy. There's also a lot of weird goings on after 9/11. Like how much of a pass on everything the Saudi's got.

Now, we're probably never going to find out if there was anything going on. Personally I think some folks were hoping for a minor terrorist incident to scare the rubes back into line and got more than they expected. It doesn't really matter. What we should take away from 9/11 was that after it happened we panicked and let the powers that be run roughshod over us all. The world didn't change after 9/11 because of 9/11. It was a tragedy, but nothing truly major was lost. We let it change after that when we let fear and anger get the best of us.

wealthy and upper middle class will be given a free pass and go into treatment. The poor will be locked up and the middle class will just have their financial lives destroyed from the high cost of defense. Both UK & US justice systems have enough leeway built into them to protect the people who matter and the rest? Well, by definition they don't matter...

True, but it's not like Chromium isn't open source. If you don't like it, fork it or at least submit a patch to remove tsync support. From some comments in the thread this sounds like a performance issue. It's there to improve multi-threading. I remember the good old days of Desktop Linux when it out performed my Win9x installs on the same hardware by a significant margin. I miss those days, and I wouldn't mind someone bringing them back.

True, but there's not really any downside to it. The put someone away for 10 years for pulling the latest Britney Spears magnum opus and it's going to have an effect. A pretty large one I'd say. Sure, it won't completely stop the behavior, but it'll slow it. Plus, what's the downside to the record labels and movie studios? Tough on Crime _always_ plays well with the base. The UK and US both are scared shirtless of Yaboos and the like. Or at least the people who vote are (doesn't count if you don't vote and young people don't). Heck, not sure about the UK but in America our white collar prisons are privately run and most of the tops 1% own stock in the companies. Plus we do prison labor in parts of the South (Elon Musk's company just got caught using it to build solar panels, I wish I could say it's a scandal but nobody cares).

Less piracy, more profit for their prisons and they get to tell the base how tough on crime they are? It's a net win for the ruling class.

that the US _wasn't_ a bunch of backwards savages. See, this is a common mistake people make. Assuming because someone takes the moral high ground that they're not willing to admit their faults. As an American let me step in here to say we're just as awful, possibly worse. The stuff we did (and continue to do) to the Middle East and South America (I hear we're back to trying to destabilize Venezuela) makes this crap look like small potatoes. And don't forget our last Vice President brought back torture as a legitimate tool for information gathering.

the incident was 6 years ago, and FF has been struggling for longer than that. Losing Google and the revenue it brought was a big blow. I felt like they wanted him out and used that as an excuse. Not that people don't lose their jobs over stupid things all the time. It's just odd to see it happen to someone so high up. Usually their above all that.

There's still a tonne of things that Firefox does for extension authors like myself to make our lives easier. I've been toying with a Chrome port of my plugin but it's been slow going since there's so much networking stuff Firefox does for me that Chrome doesn't yet (and maybe never will). Heck, I can't even use the "let" keyword yet without hacking into Chrome's config...

There should have been plenty of businesses to buy up and use that hardware. There's never a shortage of people that could put computer hardware to good use. otoh I've seen economists talking about how in the 70s businesses spent 40 cents of every dollar on investment and now it's like 10 cents, with the rest going into the shareholders/investor's pockets, so it's possible we're just seeing the effect of run away parasitism sucking all the capital out of our economy (I think the quote was something like:"Finance used to be a way to get money into productive businesses, now it's a way to get money out").

But I think it's more likely that a lack of demand for Sun hardware existed. If you're selling something for 1/10 retail it's because nobody really wants it...

Sun was run out of business by cheap Intel hardware + free Linux devouring their core business (expensive high performance workstations and servers). Nobody makes money on Java. Even IBM doesn't. They make money hiring out cheap Indian programmers. That didn't leave Sun a viable product. Intel hardware + Linux (Lintel?) got too cheap too fast. It didn't matter if you're Sun box was 10x faster. I could roll out 100 Lintel boxes for 1/10 the price.

at least not in early builds. It was MDI (multiple document interface). Maybe it was in betas or something, but back when tabs were first introduced in Firefox Opera still had an MDI interface. I remember trying it and being frustrated with how clumsy MDI was for changing between pages...