Is it "Don't read slashdot" day already? This year is going by fast.

That is true, and in the United States, the FAA already protects you from this invasion of your airspace. Since we are talking about rural areas (although I doubt a drone could be cost effective due to distance limitations in a rural area), the applicable FAR is Sec. 91.119 - Minimum safe altitudes: General.... (c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.

Obviously a rural area is the only place where the craft could legally (well, quasi-legally, assuming that by ordering you are giving permission to land on your property) land and still be more than 500 feet from a person, vessel, vehicle or structure.

If you are UPS or FedEx, you just park in the middle of the street and block traffic.

Stingrays are not related to this bill as anyone operating a Stingray is already in violation of civil and criminal law as well as being subject to a large number of FCC fines.

The DBA probably gets paid a lot because the company is desperate for someone to come in and fix the database after the developers thought they could do the job themselves.

People who do have talent and drive also sometimes end up not succeeding. The people who are willing to step on anyone will definitely end up succeeding though.

I'm waiting for some explanation of how fence can be politically incorrect. Does it discriminate against handicapped people? Do we need to build wheelchair ramps so the "differently abled" can also jump the fence?

Apparently they were at first honoring the warranty and replacing the entire water heater, but that got to be too expensive, so they stopped doing that and started saying it was installed incorrectly.

There was an article maybe a year or two back about TV standby power. It was about the same. 10 watts to as much as 15 watts. I'm sure the new fancy phone home TVs use even more in standby mode.

Well, I can vouch for the fact that we have over the last 12 years replaced just about all of the water heaters in our rental houses. The water heaters which were replaced were built in the 70s and 80s. I guess I can expect something 30 years old to fail. In fact, it probably wouldn't have failed even after 30 years if we would have checked and replaced the anode. However, the new water heaters which we have replaced them with have already had problems within just a few short years. We have had to replace pilot assemblies, thermocouples, and one has a safety device with a well known calibration problem which causes it to fail and close the dampers so that you can't light the water heater. The suggested fix is to replace the water heater because the safety is not considered field serviceable. The safety device on that unit failed after about a month of operation. One month of use seems entirely to short for a water heater, especially compared to 30 years or more for the previously installed unit.

Seems kind of unlikely. At least where I live, the upper crust drives fancy sedans. The lower class drives fancy trucks and SUVs and the middle class drives cheap econoboxes.

When I was recently laid off and applied for unemployment, I discovered that signing up for unemployment requires MSIE. Well, a lot of sites say that, so i tried it in Firefox. It didn't work, the workflow just went in circles. Then I tried it in MSIE and found the same thing. However, when i read very carefully, I noticed that it said that it had to be a specific, no longer supported version of MSIE. I set the compatibility level to that version, and then it worked. But I am sure everybody that has been laid off from work knows how to override the automatic updating of MSIE and set the compatibility level back to an older version.

I have worked in Tech for over 25 years as well. I would say that it has been my experience that there are more males involved in tech, but that it is far easier for a woman to be promoted to management than for a man. Also, pretty much all of my managers in tech, whether male or female, were not very tech savvy.

Oh I KNOW that they store it in a multitude of locations. What I want to know is what kind of technology they are using such that when their system crashes they manage to lose the data on ALL of the multitude of locations. That must be some pretty fancy technology.
Or they don't really store it in multiple locations.

Yes, exactly. just like Comcast offers service to the address of the house you are going to buy. At least until after you buy it.