Crappy camera work? I take it you'd do better?

It's not like it's an easy place to put an expensive camera into. Anything bigger than a small R/C plane and they'd have stopped the fireworks entirely -- and personally, I'm sort of surprised that they didn't when they saw this craft up there. The odds of having the craft hit by a shell and crashing into the water were significant as well.

And it's quite dark, so we're stuck with high iso mode.

Personally, I thought it was quite excellent for what it was.

No it doesn't.

The 400 (not 500) foot figure comes from FAA advisory circular 91-57 made back in 1981, and the key thing about this is that it's *advisory*, not mandatory.

The AMA safety code says "Not fly higher than approximately 400 feet above ground level within three (3) miles of an airport without notifying the airport operator." -- but those are just safety rules for AMA members (and a good idea for everybody) -- but they do not have the force of law behind them.

Now, the FAA may change the laws in the future, but so far ... this 400 foot ceiling people talk about does not exist. (Some places have restricted airspace ... that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this blanket 400 foot height limit people keep bringing up that doesn't exist.

At OSCON 2006 I was sitting in one of the green rooms (the spaces set aside for speakers before presentations). My laptop was open and I was happily hacking away on a project. As I killed a bug and checked the code back in, I muttered under my breath, "Python, I love you. You make the hard stuff so easy."

I noticed a few seconds later the room had gone utterly silent. I looked up, and sitting at the table across from me was Damian Conway, tapping away on his own laptop doing his own thing. I blinked a couple of times and suddenly noticed the entire room was expecting a Perl-vs-Python argument to erupt.

Damian looked up from his work, noticed everyone was looking nervous. He looked over at me, I gave a "I don't know what's up with them, uh, help?" look and a shrug.

Damian then looked back at the crowd and grinned. "Listen, the only thing I love more than Perl is well-written software, even if it's written in Python." He looked back over to me. "Kill a bug, didja?" I nodded. He gave me a smile and a thumbs-up, then returned to his code. I returned to mine, and after a few seconds the room let out his breath.

I love Python. But the only thing I love more than Python is well-written software, even if it's written in Perl. :)

I'm not sure "grandma" is synomous with senior citizens, but I guess it's as close as we're going to get real data on.

But either way, even if they "aged into being a senior citizen" ... there's still more of them using the Internet than not. Yes, they are often terrified of viruses and the like, and if they aren't they should be ... and I recall fixing up my mother in law's computer on a regular basis because it was riddled with crap ... but she still used it. She loved it.

And the "riddled with crap" problem isn't restricted to senior citizens. My children's computers have similar problems, and that's why I refuse to even let them use mine and set them up with their own ...

That said, if I had it all to do again today ... I might have set my mother in law up with a Chromebook or tablet or something instead, something that's pretty resistant to all the crap. I think it would do most of the stuff she wanted to do. My kids are digital natives and they want more than a tablet or Chromebook will provide -- but even so, that covers much of what they want too.

Many "grandmas" have embraced the Internet.

For example, this study from two years ago says that more than half of senior citizens now use it. They often don't know how to use it well, granted, but they're using it. And many of them *do* know how to use it well.

There's a difference between blindly trusting random crap you find on the Internet and not ever using it at all.

At least in my circles, the truly smart people fit into neither category. That said, if you must pick one or the other ... the latter is preferable.

But that's a false dichotomy ... even better is being able and willing to find things on the Internet, but having the wisdom to tell what's crap and what might be crap (and therefore needs to be confirmed) and what's probably accurate (but keep in mind, it still might not be.)

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

A long time ago, when managing some government service contracts, I had someone from the BLM walk in and essentially say, "It's the end of the fiscal year and we need to spend some money left in our budget, what's the most expensive PCs and multiple monitor setups you can find to sell us to replace all our current machines with?"

I doubt Lois Lerner, a Director managing a group with 900 employees, was making due with old obsolete hardware like the guys in the trenches do. She managed a $90M+ budget, so I'm sure they could find some cash to keep her PC up to date.

Let me explain it then ...

You've got this term "liberals". This term is expected to describe some group of people -- either you've labelled people with this term, other people have labelled people with this term, or maybe people have labelled themselves with this term ... it doesn't matter.

And you're now surprised that people identified by this term do things that seem contradictory or mutually exclusive?

Well, that's easy to explain ... this group is full of individuals with their own beliefs and goals. You or others have thrown them all into this bucket called "liberals" but that doesn't magically make them all behave the same. The reality is, even among "liberals" there is a wide range of beliefs, and when you say "get all upset" and "at the same time attack" -- you're generally talking about different individuals.

Individuals are often hypocrites, yes, but "liberals" (or "conservatives", or members of any other group) are not hypocrites simply because one individual does one thing and another individual does a contradictory thing.

Consider yourself lucky, then, and pray that it lasts. The people around you are not made of such strong stuff, and I can't be sure that you are either.

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

You don't really even need to get into whether you hold human life sacred, etc., to get that argument across. It's mostly just an economic argument, you believe yourself to be sensible and don't want to pay for people who aren't.

The ironic thing about this is that it translates to "I don't want to pay for the self-inflicted downfall of the people who exercise the libertarian rights I deeply believe they should have."

OK, not a bad position as far as it goes. Now, tell me how we should judge each case, once these people present themselves for medical care, and what we should do if they don't meet the standard.

Citation needed.

I just looked for a minute and found This NIMH study. If you look at the percentages per year they are astonishingly high. 9% of people in any particular year just for mood disorders, and that's just the first on the list. Then they go down the list of other disorders. The implication is that everyone suffers some incident of mental illness in their lives. And given the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and lay practitioners in practice, it seems like much of the population try to get help at times, if only from their priest or school guidance counselor.

You are not a rock. Can you honestly tell me that you haven't ever suffeed a moment of irrationality?

I'm curious what his stance is on most martial arts practitioners.

I've never heard of one invading a school and karate-chopping a dozen young kids to death. Have you?