"Outside some bank accounts ...."

"Outside of some bank accounts" is pretty much the same qualification that could be made for almost any scam that doesn't involve providing defective products. In this case there will clearly never be any "trip to Mars", so your statement is correct, but that does not make it any less of a scam.

Yea I knew it before the article. The "application fee" was pretty much a dead give away. What more proof? I bet that you don't know anybody that applied and wasn't selected as one of the 100 finalists and then hit up for more money.

Duh! What part of "is being encouraged to give more and more money to the group" gives that away?

beaverdownunder isn't really trying to ask a question at all. He just wants to hype his own Basic called Discocrapper (no point in giving him the satisfaction of repeating the actual name). This entire thread isn't about any valid ask Slashdot question, it is just a spammy link.

Blackphone 2 Caters To the Enterprise, the Security-Minded and the Gullible.

Once you can convince people to wear bright flashing beacons that label them for extra special attention, you win. Clearly anyone who wants to protect their privacy is either a bank robber or a terrorist.

Oh great, a more secure version of crap that no one wants.

He's dead, Jim.

I wonder if this is why Obama doesn't act against ISIS.

What? You think they consider that some sort of privacy issue? Actually, they do just the opposite. They print out their customer lists and bind them into thick books. Then they "hand out" those customer lists with addresses and phone numbers to telemarketers and other nuisance callers. Want off that published customer list? OK, but it will cost you. Just another way for AT&T to screw their customers.

More likely it was just someone that AT&T pissed off. Just ask AT&T for a list of all the people they have screwed and you'll have an abundance of suspects.

Kermit is a good choice, should be able to do all he needs with no extra cost as long as he can cable 2 computers together.

I specifically dislike those telling him to buy a UBS adapter for the old disk drive or other solutions that require spending money and waiting. I do have such an adapter, and a PCMCIA firewire card that would open other options for me, but they are not needed in this case.

Another option that seems to be ignored is that XP computer he says he also has. At that vintage it likely has USB and Ethernet. I would try swapping the drive into that (if it isn't too thick to fit) and booting the XP computer with a Live Linux CD (the 3.11 Windows disk will likely not boot properly and would not have the needed drivers even if it did). Then from Linux you could easily write the 160 meg drive contents to a USB flash drive or transfer it across ethernet to the destination computer (I would do that with FTP but there are any number of options).

I think the question was more about "How can technology improve upon the bad judicial system?". My first thought was "heat seeking missiles".

The imagined benefit of the drones was that some people who didn't care at all about costs but wanted intimidate gratification (and who lived near an Amazon warehouse) would supposedly pay an outrageous fee to get their little order delivered quickly by drone. Quickly meaning in the next few hours, and definitely today. You can already pay an exorbitant fee for next day delivery if your a rich prick who thinks that they need their Amazon toy tomorrow rather than today. It would be pointless to pay more for drone delivery and then wait for the truck to be loaded tomorrow and drive to your neighborhood (perhaps late in the afternoon by the time it gets to your neighborhood) and then risk the complications of drone delivery just to claim that it was delivered by drone rather than by the smuck in the truck. Similarly, we're a long way from having it be economically practical to drive to a neighborhood and then deploy the drone rather than just have the driver punt the fragile package to the door himself. And we've seen plenty of evidence lately that the UPS and FedEX drivers are quite capable of abusing fragile shipments all by them selves without the help of a drone.

Quite frankly, a "Delivered today by an Uber driver" plan makes a lot more sense and is much more economically feasible than delivering by drone (via truck) tomorrow. And in the long run, delivered by a self driving vehicle makes more sense than delivery by drone. A self driving vehicle could drive up to my house as well or better than the UPS man can do today, and I don't have to worry about providing a drone landing pad or other drone related issues.

This discussion in no way should be taken as an indication that I ever believed Amazon was serious about drone delivery.