Ultimately, your property "rights" are granted rights, not inalienable or natural rights. You don't own air rights or mineral rights for simple, pragmatic reasons.

Hell, by international convention "conquest" is the most sure-fire way to get more real estate.

As for noise pollution - people have been suing over that since the dawn of aviation. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose (hard to prove harm if you bought a house near an existing airport...). Over the years, we've made jets quieter, we've restricted the operating hours, and we've limited flight to sub-sonic over land. People fight over industrial plant emissions, sewer plant location, and yes - fracking locations - all the time.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that drone use will be regulated through the democratic process and not (solely) by some quaint notion of property rights.

Couldn't the drones include cameras? Very good cameras fit in smartphones, so this isn't a size or weight problem.

I doubt anyone living in a place like Manhattan would even notice, with all of the noise already present - especially from street traffic.

It wouldn't matter - any company with a presence in the US would be at risk, no matter where they hoard their earnings.

Right, but you HAVE to take the new phone when you are up for it, or you leave money on the table. If you promptly re-sell the phone this might work out financially. (Or in the unlikely event that your phone wears out or breaks at exactly the same interval as your replacement schedule.) The payment plans are a much better deal (if the interest rate isn't too high), since the payment eventually stops. The subsidy in the old plans went on forever.

Those things are what taught me to buy drives in pairs.

A lightning strike taught me not to have both drives connected at the same time :)

Crashplan and friends are God's gift to the lazy backup plan.

I disagree, but then neither of us are climate scientists so our opinions are pretty worthless.

When did hard drives not fail? I've had failures since the early 90s, when they were in the 200 MB range.

"Enterprise" is not just the subject of that poster on the wall in your mom's basement.

Of course, but that sort of defeats the purpose of forecasting. The idea is to predict what is going to happen in the future so that you can make good decisions with your resources. Knowing that average temperatures are rising, and to what extent, is useful information.

Like I said, you could be correct. My bet, however, would be with the people who dedicate their lives to study such things. They are obviously fallible, being human - but they are still the best that we have.

I have to chaff a little bit at "assume". They don't blindly assume anything - the models that scientists have been working on for 30 or 40 years all say that the heat is still on earth. They have to "find" the heat to improve the models. You could be correct - the heat could be escaping through some mechanism that is not understood or currently measured, but that's not the high-percentage bet.

This is a common tactic I see on Slashdot: "How can Slashdot be praising x when they usually say y?"

The folks claiming that the "hiatus" is a denier hoax are not necessarily the same folks who published this paper.

Furthermore, the argument is not that "hiatus" is a denier hoax - any fool can see temperature readings have been flat in most measured areas. The counter-argument is typically that the Earth is really big and that surface measurements alone do not necessarily represent the amount of heat absorbed by the atmosphere. Where all of that heat has been going was where the speculation has been, with the usual supposition being "the ocean" or "the poles".

Sweeeeeeet.

But that's just a payment plan. Unless you have one of these crazy grandfathered plans, you are in fact paying more than if you bought your own hammer as it wore out.

No, and frankly that would be a bad policy as it would get rid of any motivation for you to move closer to where you work. Even so, it is very common for executives to get leased vehicles.