What is the risk of a drone hovering 100 feet up taking photos of a house?

Just have the FAA issue $50 ADS-B transponders which anybody can install on a drone or aircraft and that would probably do a lot more to promote collision avoidance than keeping people from taking pictures of their own houses.

As far as heavy drones go - regulate them like baseballs hit into windows and such. You don't need a license to operate a baseball and yet we don't have them showering down on our cars all day long.

Flatten the organization is simple enough - fire or demote managers so that there are more people reporting to any particular manager.

Really this sounds like the kind of buzz-speak I was hearing at work a few years ago when the same sorts of things were done. The same Accenture consultant probably wrote the slide deck.

Fewer people = fewer people involved in each decision, etc. They always talk about changing the culture, because talking about layoffs doesn't exactly make people excited to go to work.

You get a radio pulse every time lightning strikes. I think that this is a fairly unlikely explanation. If it were more regular and had some kind of repeating pattern to it then I'd start thinking galactic navigation beacon or something, but natural pulsars probably work well enough for that already.

Yeah, I get a chuckle every time I hear some IT manager at my employer talk about "big data." Often it is followed by a reference to an archive of raw scientific data which spans maybe 8-10 TB from the last 6 years or so and is mostly junk in a huge variety of formats.

When your big data problem can fit in the PC sitting under my desk, it isn't a big data problem. Heck, I'd give them "you can solve it like you would a big data problem" angle except they're not really doing that either.

The problem with this is the tragedy of the commons. It would be like letting your kids decide how to spend the household budget. You'd go to 14 movies each weekend, and eat Happy Meals every night, and nobody would pay the mortgage.

If the average voter can't figure out how to vote for somebody other than the guy with the biggest campaign fund, how is giving them a line-item veto over the budget going to help?

Oh, and keep in mind who pays all the taxes. Funding for the pesky SEC, who needs that? ERISA and OSHA - how quaint! Let's go ahead and spend the national budget on more corporate bailouts!

Ironically that link just gets an access denied message for anybody hosting a tor relay node (not an exit node)... :)

Why not?

Because the FCC hasn't been completely bought by the industry... yet.

Must make it fun dealing with people with Klinefelter's. Just how do you define "gender" in today's society? Today we're just getting started with the marriage debate, but in 20 years we'll progress to figuring out what to do with bathrooms and workplace etiquette.

So, as others pointed out acetaminophen is actually fairly dangerous as drugs go. However, let's pick on something like ibuprofen instead which is definitely safer.

Today even ibuprofen would have trouble making it as a non-prescription drug.

Pain-killers in general have the deck stacked against them. For something like a heart medication to get on the market you basically have to show that it saves more lives than it takes. So, if it prevents 10k more heart attacks per year than any other drug on the market, and it kills 10 people per year due to liver toxicity, then it isn't hard to get it approved.

Painkillers don't benefit from this kind of calculus. If it kills 3 people a year, you can't point to a single life that they save to balance it out. So, our regulatory system tends to keep painkillers off the market. It is hard to balance lives cut short vs long lives lived in agony.

Diet medications have a lot of problems with suicide and tend to be kept off the market for the same reason. (Which makes me really wonder about the interaction between diet, obesity, and depression - eating is a basic instinct and we already know that people eat when they're upset - the need to eat is in many ways driven by emotion.)

That may be a matter of opinion and perspective as well.

Those are late compositions in Greek and clearly not part of the original Hebrew Bible (properly called the Tanakh.)

The books you mention, along with the so-called New Testament books, both those declared 'canonical' by the Imperial Roman authorities and the other books that were banned instead, along with the Talmud, are all in my mind defensible and even in cases valuable, as Midrash, as Commentary, as a record of what men at the time thought on some important subjects - but NOT as scripture to be elevated to stand with the Tanakh, let alone to actually be set ON TOP of the Bible proper as so many do.

"Probably the best solution would be for the company to split up. The people who make the Xbox are probably weighed down by the rest of the company's ineptitude. I'd like to see those guys go their own way"

XBOX is running a version of Windows, which, is in many ways better than Linux. What's up for debate is its openness or lack thereof, but featureswise, Windows has lead Unix in a lot of ways.

Even Windows 3.1 had a better device independent rendering model than did the X terminals it competed against. And, ever since Windows NT, Windows has always had better APIs for threading while all many Unix's had (except for Solaris), was fork. DirectX is generally better than OpenGL. COM has its faults but in the long run proved to be the only binary object model that ever got used, and even the Windows desktop and shell has vastly better basic things like file dialogs than does Linux.

Visual Studio is still arguably the best IDE around and has been ever since Microsoft bought the Delphi guy over to write C#, and speaking of which, C# is a way better language than Java. Microsoft Office is still better than Open Office.

It's not that Microsoft has really sucked at the desktop, ever. They've just won so completely at it that they don't know how to do anything else right, although, I do think my Windows 8.1 phone is better than my iPhone 5s in some ways.